30 Pieces of a Novel

Ends

The Cake

HIS MOTHER SAID, “I got us something special for Halloween tonight. A Halloween cake with favors in it.” “What are they?” and she said, “That’s right, you wouldn’t know. I can’t show you the favors, but I’ll show you the places in the cake they’re in,” and opened the cake box. The cake was orange and black and decorated with a smiling Halloween pumpkin on top and had strings coming out the sides. “After we’ve eaten, I’ll bring the cake to the table. I think it’s bad luck to tell you what a favor is beforehand, so you’ll have to find out when you pull the string and the favor comes out with it.” “How many are there in there?” and she said, “Same number as the strings. Count them; that’s how you learn adding,” and he counted the strings. “Six. Who’ll pull out the other strings if I only pull one?” and she said, “Your father can, if he wants, but I doubt he will. He doesn’t think much of Halloween as a holiday, and he also doesn’t like games like that.” “And the other four strings?” and she said, “Good, if you’re counting Daddy, that makes four left. When did you learn how to subtract?” and he said, “What’s that?” “What you did; two taken away from six is four, and so on.” “I just did it, I didn’t take away.” “Anyway, of the remaining five, or four, if Daddy does play along, I’ll pull one.” “What do you think your favor will look like?” and she said, “You trying to find out what a favor is by asking me that? I told you — bad luck, especially on Halloween,” and he said, “I wasn’t, but I think it’s like a very small toy. Is it wrapped?” and she said, “Did you peek inside the cake? That’s also bad luck. And wrapped? That’d be a hoot if it was. No, it’s loose, my dear, and if I don’t want mine I’ll give it to you — was that going to be your next question?” “Will I have to give you mine for yours?” and she said, “No, even if I give you mine, yours is yours for keeps.” “And the three others, if Daddy takes one?” and she said, “The rest, unless he gets surprisingly involved in the string-pulling and wants to do more than one, are yours.” “I can’t wait. And you should tell him pulling more than one favor out is something only for children to do.” “I don’t know. It’d be sweet to have him get caught up in something silly like that, but we’ll see.” He ate his dinner quickly that night, and when his mother said, “Want seconds?” he said, “No, just the cake; can we have it now?” “What’s so special about the cake that he ate supper so fast?” his father said, and she said, “Something you might even think special enough to hurry your eating for.” “Oh, yeah, oh, boy, I can just see it: some pastry you like but you’ll insist you bought because you thought it one of my favorites from the old days.” “It’s a Halloween cake with favors in it,” Gould said, and he said, “What do you mean, favors?” “Strings,” and he said, “Strings in the cake? This is getting better and better. I thought strings are supposed to tie up the cake box, not be in the cake. What’s it, a spaghetti cake?” “I honestly didn’t think you’d like it,” his mother said, “so just in case, I bought you a cheese Danish.” “A cheese Danish I like, a prune one even better; but a plain shnecken, of all the ones in that family, I like most of all. You don’t happen to have one of those, do you?” and she said, “Only a cheese Danish and the Halloween favors cake. And you’ll have to wait, Gould, till your father and I are done eating, and that means the main plate and a salad for me.” “Salad,” his father said. “Next to the cake with the strings in it — and when the salad has sliced onions and carrots on it, even more so — that’s what I like eating best.” So he waited. He excused himself once—“May I be excused to go to the bathroom?”—and his father said, “Sure, Mr. Manners, be my guest,” though he had asked his mother, and went to the bathroom, didn’t pee, just washed his hands, which he could have done in the kitchen but didn’t think she’d have let him get up to go there just for that, and on his way back stopped in the kitchen to look at the closed cake box. What will his favor be? Probably a car, soldier, football, real or rocking horse. “Gould, are you in there?” his mother said. “Come on back; we want your company.” “Why?” he said, sitting at the table. “And what do you want to talk about?” “For instance, what you did at school today.” “Nothing,” and his father said, “That’s what we’re paying good money to the school for — nothing?” and she said, “What are you talking about? It’s a public school,” and his father said, “So, that’s my joke. You didn’t get it. I’m wasting good humor on you.” “I got it,” Gould said, “and it made me laugh inside.” “Certainly you did more than nothing there,” she said, and he said, “We sat on the floor and the teacher read a story.” “So he sat on the floor,” his father said; “he did something.” “What else you do?” his mother said, and Gould said, “We played in the playhouse. I was an Indian, other boys were cowboys.” “And the girls, what were they,” his father said, “barmaids and squaws?” “Do you know how to hold a conversation with him?” and his father said, “Sure I do, what a lousy thing to say,” and she said, “Then hold one; and other things, try to hold in.” “Now that’s good and clever; I’m finally having some influence on you after all these years.” “The girls played by themselves in the kitchen of the playhouse,” Gould said. “Are you almost finished now?” and she said, “Almost.” “She still has the radish part of her salad to eat,” his father said, “or belching roses, I call them. They take a long time to get down but shorter to come back up,” and she said, “Daddy’s humoring us again,” and smiled at his father, and his father smiled back and this made Gould happy, though he didn’t know what funny things they were smiling about. Then he and his mother cleared the table and she brought the cake in. “Strings, you weren’t joking, real strings,” his father said. “If I was a violinist I’d play on them. But what in God’s name is the rest of it? Orange and black. What could it taste like? Pure crap,” and she said, “Don’t ruin it for him.” “It’s special for tonight,” Gould said. “I don’t know which one to pull; they all look the same.” “You mean they aren’t the same?” his father said. “No, they have different favors at the ends of them. Do you want to pull one out after Mommy and I do?” and his father said, “Are you kidding? Mine no doubt has a bomb on it, hand-chosen by your mother, that’ll blow up my fingers.” “Very funny,” she said, “and a wonderful impression you’re giving him of me,” and he said, “So, I made you laugh, didn’t I? even if you’re not laughing. That’s why you put up with all the other awful things I do to you.” “That’s no lie,” and Gould said, “What awful things is Daddy talking about?” and she said, “Just pull one of the strings; you’ve been wanting to all afternoon.” But which one should he? If he pulls one, the favor on it might not be as good as the ones on the other strings. And then his mother could pull out the best favor and it’s so good she might not want to give it to him. “I can’t make up my mind,” he said. “You have to, because I want to start cutting the cake.” “Where’s my cheese Danish?” his father said. “Though I really would’ve preferred a plain shnecken. Will you remember that next time?” and she said, “I will, and the Danish is coming.” “And coffee?” and she said, “Shh, everyone,” moved her head to listen to what was going on in the kitchen, said, “It’s already percolating, I have to turn it down,” and ran to the kitchen. “This one,” Gould said. He doesn’t know why. It’s closest to him, facing him, so maybe his mother put the cake down that way so he’d pull that string because she knew it was the one he’d like best. That’s what she’d do. But how would she know what favor was there? The bakery person could have told her. Or she could have said, “This one should be for Gould”—pointing to a box with all the different favors in it the bakery person might have brought out to show her, then have that person mark the part of the cake where the favor was put in, though he doesn’t see any different kind of marking there. He grabbed the string, closed his eyes, said to himself, “I hope I’m right and it’s the best one, though I won’t know till they’re all pulled out. Then just a very good one I’ll like and want to keep,” and pulled. It was a little metal figure of a girl holding a teddy bear. “So what is it?” his father said. “It’s so small, I can’t see from here,” and his mother came in with the coffee and Danish and said, “Let me see. Nice, a doll, and well crafted. Years from now it’ll be a miniature treasure.” “But I don’t like girls with dolls.” “Breaks of the game,” his father said, “and the way life goes. But years from now you’ll love little dolls,” and he said, “How could that happen?” and his mother said, “Your father’s being silly again. Pull another, dear, but after me,” and she pulled out, without closing her eyes — maybe that’s how he should have done it — a metal racing car. She won’t want that, he thought. “It’s pretty, but a racing car for you?” he said. “Again, well crafted,” she said, “better than anything you’d get out of a Cracker Jack box. Maybe I’ll lick it off and put it in my purse and it’ll always be there to suddenly come upon and remind me of tonight.” “Why, what’s so special about tonight?” “I’d like one of the favors too,” his father said, “even if I won’t touch the cake,” and Gould said to her, “Should someone be let to pull one who doesn’t eat the cake? Isn’t that bad luck?” “There’s no such thing as bad luck,” his father said. “If something bad happens to you it’s because of something you did or didn’t do or someone else or other people did, but explainable, even when nature does it,” and he said, “I don’t think so,” and his father said, “But you understood what I was saying? Good, you’re developing quite the brain,” and pulled the string nearest him. He got a racing car too. “Two cars in one cake,” his mother said. “That’s not supposed to happen. Each favor should be singular, one of a kind.” “Take the cake back then,” his father said. “No, don’t,” Gould said. “And if I got two racing cars I could race them.” “Then you got mine”—putting the car in front of him — and his mother said, “Same here,” and put hers down next to it. “Now let’s have my Danish,” and she said, “It’s in front of you, next to your coffee,” and he said, “Well, what do you know,” and took a bite from it. “Can I pull out the other favors?” Gould said, and she said, “Wait till tomorrow night. It’ll give us something to look forward to after dinner, and I might want to try my luck again,” and his father said, “Good strategy. It’ll also keep him eating his supper,” and he said, “I always eat, if I’m not sick,” and his father said, “Don’t argue; do what your mother says.” Gould had some cake, washed the cars in the bathroom, left the metal girl on the tablecloth — if his mother throws it away, it’s okay; if she asks does he want it, he’ll say, “You can have it, what I got’s good.” He held a car between the thumb and forefinger of each hand — they were about an inch long — and drove them around the apartment, along the walls, on the furniture and rugs, while making car noises with his mouth. In bed he drove them up and down the hills his knees made under the covers and then put them under his pillow right before he shut off the light. He was going to take them to school tomorrow and show them around. There might be one or two boys who got one tonight but he bets none of them have two. His father brought home chow mein and egg rolls and rice for dinner the next night, and for dessert they had sherbet his mother had made. They had different desserts the next few nights, and about a week later he said to his mother, “What happened to the cake with the favors? I forgot about it,” and she said, “I’m sorry, it was pushed way back in the refrigerator and got so old I threw it out yesterday. You didn’t take the favors out?” and he said, “You told me not to till we ate the cake. Darn, I wonder what they were — did you know?” and she said, “No. Maybe another car, or maybe all dolls. We should remember the next time to take them all out if we get it again,” and he said, “We should; the cake was good.” They got the same Halloween cake the next few years. He was always allowed to pull four favors out the first night and his parents pulled one each. His father once got a woman’s engagement ring and gave it to his mother across the table and said, “Will you marry me?” and she said, “I can’t, I’d be a bigamist.” Gould didn’t understand that. He got lots of different favors every year; they always seemed to change. One year he got another racing car, but by this time he’d lost the cars he got from the first cake. Then one Halloween afternoon he said to his mother, “Where’s the box for the favors cake — aren’t we going to have it tonight?” and she said, “The bakery stopped making them. Said there wasn’t much call for them anymore and they also ran out of the metal favors and the place that made them went out of business. But I think I got you something special you’ll like to replace it,” and gave it to him that night for dessert — an orange and black cupcake with a plastic witch on a broomstick stuck into the top of it — and his father said, “Too bad, I was getting used to pulling one of those favors out every year. So, times change.” “I can get you a Halloween cupcake next time,” she said, and he said, “No, no, a shnecken’s just fine.”

The Lot

Driving his daughter to high school, turns into the first driveway he can make a left at in the parking lot in front of the school, makes another left into a parking space. “Goodbye, Daddy, I love you”—grabbing her backpack off the floor. “Love you too — got your glasses?” and she says, “Oh, no, I forgot them at home,” and looks at him in a way where she wonders if he’ll get mad. “Please, sweetheart, remember them, will you? — your eyes,” and kisses her forehead, and she smiles and leaves. Car’s coming slowly as she’s crossing the next driveway, he thinks it’s going to stop but it doesn’t, and she has to jump out of the way, driver waving his thanks to her as he passes or maybe the wave means something else, and she looks at Gould as if she’s made another mistake and he leans over the passenger seat and yells out the window, “It wasn’t your fault; it was that damn driver’s. He should’ve stopped for you. You’re the pedestrian and that’s a one-way road just like mine and he was driving against it. What the hell’s wrong with him, when all you kids are going to school?” and she shrugs as if it doesn’t matter, and he says, “What, you don’t think it’s important?” and she says, “Of course I do, but don’t make a big deal of it. It’s over and I’m sure other kids are watching us,” and he says, “So they’re watching, but it is a big deal because it concerns them all. It can happen again and again and from the same person till someone — you, for instance, since I drive you here every day and you always cross the same driveway since I always pull into this one — gets hit real bad. Was the driver a student or someone driving a student to school?” and she says, “Who?” and he says, “The driver, I said the driver,” and gets out and looks for the car in the direction it was going. It’s pulling into a space about a hundred feet away and he heads over to it; she says, behind him, “Please, Daddy, leave it alone; I wasn’t hurt and I have to get to school. The first bell’s already rung,” and he says, “I just want to tell whoever it was that what he did was wrong. And that he should from now on drive more carefully and also respectfully of the pedestrians or I’m reporting his license plate number to the school office and, if that doesn’t work, then to the police.” The boy’s getting out of the car — a girl’s sitting in the front seat checking herself in the mirror on the sun shield, another girl’s gathering her things in back — and he says to him, “Do you know how to drive?” and the boy says, “Sure, I’ve been doing it for more than three years,” and he says, “Then how come when that girl over there”—pointing to his daughter, who’s staring at the ground: doesn’t want the boy to think she had anything to do with sending her father over—“is crossing the road you didn’t stop for her and almost ran into her?” and the boy says, “What girl, the one in the green shirt?” and he says, “Come on, you saw her — you even waved your thanks or something to her when she jumped back so not to be hit by you,” and the boy says, “No, I didn’t see her — when did this happen?” The girls are out of the car now—“Anything wrong, Jeremy?”—and the boy says, “No, I can handle it, thanks.” “And one more thing: you drove the opposite direction you should have in this lane. You could have avoided the whole incident if you had taken seriously the painted arrow on the ground at the entrance you came in. I could have taken that road too, you know — it’s one driveway closer to school, so a good twenty steps shorter for my daughter — but the arrow clearly told me not to and it should have done the same to you.” “I didn’t see any arrow. You sure one’s there? Besides, everyone drives both ways on these roads — they’re wide enough and so far I haven’t heard of anyone getting hit because of it,” and he said, “There’s an arrow, believe me, a big one pointing in the opposite direction you were heading, and whether you saw it or not, only you know if you’re telling the truth on that, and because some cars go the wrong way doesn’t make it right. My daughter—” and the boy says, “That blond girl in the green shirt is who you say I almost hit?” and he says, “Yes, and she didn’t look in the direction you were coming from because she didn’t think cars came from that way, but the other,” and the boy says, “Then from now on she should look both ways before she steps out — not for me so much but just to play it extra safe.” “Daddy,” she says, coming closer but still about fifteen feet away, “drop it, will you please? You said what you had to and people are watching and they have to get to school,” and the boy says, “I think she’s right. You’ve already been hotheaded enough for one day,” and he says, “What do you mean hotheaded? Have I done anything but calmly try to reason with you? Yet you haven’t given a clue as to having heard or thought about anything I’ve said.” “Yeah, well, who says I have to show you that? That’s only my business,” and he says, “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” and the boy looks angry and says, “It means what it means, so just beat it,” and he wants to take a poke at the kid, that’s what he feels: to jump on him and hit his face and hurt him good, and maybe he would have but his daughter’s pulling on his arm — maybe she sees how angry he is and the boy too and wants to save herself even more embarrassment — and pulls him toward his car, and he says, “What’re you doing?” and she says, “Don’t say anything, just go; you’ve already done enough harm,” and he says, “How? That obnoxious kid didn’t take in a word I said. All stupid cockiness,” and she says, “Please, no more, I’m already late, and this was disgusting; I’ll never be able to live it down,” and he says, “But what was I supposed to do? That punk will continue to drive like that till he kills someone with his car. His girlfriends just stayed there glaring at me when they should’ve told him he was wrong and that he should consider what I was saying rather than denying and lying about every bit of it,” and she lets go of him and looks as if she’s crying but no tears are there, and then they are, down her face, and he says, “Okay, okay, what’d I do? I’m sorry, you’re right, I should’ve controlled myself, though I still know he was wrong — you almost got creamed by his car; it was a half second off from happening, a second at the most,” and she says, “But it didn’t happen, right?” and he says, “Yes, and it was embarrassing to you, I should’ve thought about that too. Look at me, almost sixty and still acting like a hothead, just like the kid told me,” and she says, “He said that? Then he was right. And he didn’t seem so bad, just protecting himself in front of his friends, especially girls. He didn’t want to look bad; that’s what kids do. He even seemed nice. He didn’t shout at you or raise his fists or look tough: nothing like that. He didn’t see me when he was driving, that was all, a little mistake,” and he says, “I’m very sorry, but I can’t apologize to the boy now so I’ll just tell you,” and leans forward to kiss her and she backs away, as if that’s the craziest thing she’s ever seen, wanting to kiss her after all this, and looks both ways on the driveway — no cars are coming — and she crosses it and heads to school. The boy’s talking to some boys and girls by the car, watches Fanny climb the school steps and go into the building, points to her, smiles, says something, likes her looks, is going to try and find out who she is, he may even be asking the kids there if they know her, but it shouldn’t be too difficult if they don’t, it’s not a large school, she’s probably a freshman, sophomore at the most, green shirt with a white collar, beige slacks, blond to reddish hair if he saw right, very pretty, no question about that, father drives her to school in a dark gray van, and father’s an old guy, though that won’t help in finding out who she is; he’ll try to date her, first introduce himself in the hallway or lunchroom and pretend he’s sorry about what happened and that he nearly hit her with his car, or maybe he’ll be sincere about it, try to sleep with her after a couple of dates, kiss her and try to feel her up on the first, he’s a good-looking kid, not smart-looking but almost none of the boys in the school look as if they are, but that’s just a look, he might be bright; he’ll be apologetic, that’ll appeal to her, say he’s sorry her dad got upset, he knows he shouldn’t be going in the wrong direction in that driveway but that’s what kids their age do, isn’t that right? and next time, in fact he has been, since that time, more careful; he’ll end up sleeping with her, she’s vulnerable, he’s probably a senior, she’ll be easily persuaded, or not so easily but he’ll know how to act and look and what to say to win her over; the boy’s cool and nice, she’ll think, and three to four years older and that’s a plus too; he found the boy repulsive but saw things in him he thinks she’ll like: the good looks, lots of wavy hair, tall, slim body, but slimy voice and face — a liar, a rat, a fake — this is the boy she’ll probably start seeing, she’s never dated any boy and he hates this one, not just the prospect of his sleeping with her but for lying, for not seeing what he did was wrong, for continuing to drive when he should have stopped — it all says something — for almost running into her and not seeming the least fazed by it, for — oh, forget it. Go home. It’s not good for him to make these things into so much, get riled up about them, and so on, and he gets into the car, starts it, turns on the radio: news — who wants news? who wants voices? he wants music, not news, something soothing or beautiful or moving to help get the whole thing out of his head — and switches stations, music’s too trumpety on this one, switches to another public station, one some distance away that he can never get at home but his car radio picks up sometimes, it’s pledge week there and they’re prattling like idiots, and he shuts the radio off and drives.

The Phone

He got a phone put in that day. His woman friend had said, “How can I stay over in an apartment with no phone? My daughter, when she’s with her father, might want to call me, or he might want to call me about her or that he’s going to be late bringing her home.” She said, “Sometimes I’ve business to do on weekends, so how am I supposed to do it at your place if I can’t make or receive a call?” She said, “What if we just want to call a theater for movie times or make a reservation for someplace?” and he said, “For movie listings, we look in the paper — that I’ve always got. And what would we make a reservation for, a restaurant? I don’t go to restaurants I have to reserve a table for. Right away I know it’s too expensive for me, and I like to go to a restaurant when I feel like going to one, not when they tell me I can have a reservation. So what else, a resort somewhere? Who’s got money for resorts? Maybe you do, a little to spare, but I wouldn’t let you pay for me for even a night’s stay.” “My dad might be sick and I want him to always be able to reach me in case it seems it could get worse,” and so on. “I don’t like it when the damn bell rings,” he’d said. “I might be deep into my work or a book, cut off from everything outside my head, when suddenly there’s this loud ring; it sometimes scares the hell out of me,” and she said, “Millions of people in the city put up with it, you can’t? What am I saying? Billions around the world put up with phone rings. But if it jars you that much, get one where you can turn off the rings, though I don’t see how you’ll know if someone’s calling you then, or one which has soft tinkling chimes instead of bells — I haven’t seen one but I know they exist.” So he got the phone, a regular one with an ON and OFF switch, since the chimes cost a few dollars extra a month. It was the daughter argument that mostly convinced him — her daughter even told him: “Sometimes I want to talk to my mother if I’m with my father for the weekend and I’m feeling sad or lonely.” His first phone of his own in about ten years — the last was when he was a per diem substitute teacher for the Board of Education and got work when one or another school called him almost every morning. And that night, while reading in bed, he got a call, the first ring startling him. It’s probably her, he thought; nobody else knows he has a phone, and he gave her the number a few days ago, after he’d applied for a phone and the phone company told him what it’d be, though next time when it’s this late and he’s reading or going to sleep he’ll turn the phone off. He grabbed the receiver — phone was on the floor by an easy chair at the other end of the room; he’d wanted it installed away from his desk and bed because of the rings — sat in the chair, and said, “Hi, and just think, my very first call on my very first phone in more than ten years — a landmark of sorts, wouldn’t you say?” and a man said, “What’s that?” and he said, “Oops, sorry, thought you were someone else. You must have the wrong number, sir, or the right one, but of someone who had this number a few months to a year ago,” and the man said, “I don’t think so. Is this Mr. Bookbinder?” and he said yes and the man said, “Then I have the right number if your name is also Gould, and only wanted to say—” and he said, “You’re not from the phone company, are you? It’s too late for that kind of call. What is it, near twelve?” and the man said, “That late? Excuse me, I wasn’t aware. But not phone company; just someone who—” and he said, “And tell me, how’d you get my number? I only got the phone today, maybe six hours ago. What, the phone company passed my number around already — sold it, I mean, for whatever lists companies buy to contact people at home to sell them something? Because I explicitly told them not to sell it, give it away, anything, to any person or company; just to list it with telephone Information and in the directory and that’s all,” and the man said, “I got it from Information. I looked in the Manhattan phone book, didn’t see your name there or even in the ones from a few years back, so called Information, and when she told me there was no listing for you, I said — because I knew you lived in the city; your bio notes always say that — well, then try new listings, since it’s possible he only got a phone the last week or so. But I never thought today was that day; that’s astounding,” and he said, “Okay, but why is it you called?” and the man said, “Only to say — and I don’t do this regularly with people like you, I want you to know — how much I admire your work, especially the piece in the current Zanzibar. I hope this isn’t inconvenient or even upsetting to you in any way to hear this. But when I truly like someone’s work and I know that person lives in the city, and a few times elsewhere in the States and once even in Paris, I call him. My French isn’t good, or not fluent enough to get a number from Paris Information, or perhaps that particular person I wanted to reach wasn’t listed there or didn’t have a phone: Daniella Raymonde, do you know her work?” and he said, “Never heard of her,” and the man said, “Oh, you should, and she’s been translated very well here too. She’s unbelievable, almost the best; certainly up there with the contemporary great ones, I’d say, of the last twenty years. Now she’s dead, a year ago, lung cancer — her smoking … you didn’t read of it?” and he said, “As I told you—” and the man said, “It was a small obit — typical, typical, for so fine an artist, but in the Times, though no photo; the smoking and lung cancer I learned of from a friend. You don’t smoke, do you?” and he said, “Never. Anyway, thanks. Raymonde, Daniella; I’ll try to remember it. And your name, sir?” and the man gave it and started going into what he liked about Gould’s work: “Not just that almost no one’s heard of you, so I feel you’re like my own discovery, though you do have an audience, believe me; I’ve spoken to a few people who are acquainted with your work, and I try to hype you up whenever I can to others, but” the this, the that: the way Gould slyly maneuvers the archetypal incident into something original, aggressively abuses the commonplace phrase into new meaning, withholds, then all of a sudden unloads; the excisions, elisions, excursions: Gould didn’t know what he was talking about—“If you say so, I guess, though most of what you’re saying is news to me and not exactly part of my work habits or mental … well, you know, process, since I never think of those things when I’m doing it or after”—the extremes he goes to, ways he exploits the matter-of-fact and the inconsequential and often the underexploited and occasionally what to everyone else heretofore was unexploitable, then coming around to the beginning again and starting the same thing in the same way as if he never touched on it before but making it entirely fresh and equally inimitable: “This I find amazing if not miraculous or, let’s say, because I don’t want to get too off-the-wall about this, done amazingly well, especially in the Zanzibar piece. That one seemed an enormous breakthrough for you and is one of your best, perhaps your best, of what I’ve read — I hope it’s your newest. It amalgamates everything you do — is almost an historical pastiche of all your past styles and themes, or ones I’m familiar with. What do you say about that, would you agree?” and he said, “About what?” and the man said, “About what I said,” and he said, “And what was that?” and the man said, “Please, you have to be kidding me,” and he said, “Best, worst, where it stands among the others and so forth, even if a little of what you said I think I can now recognize in some of what I do. But the truth is, I hate talking about any of that and feel such talk can only be self-defeating in the long run, though I can’t now say why specifically, and in the short run — well, it can only turn out to be something else, but I forget what I started out to say,” and the man said, “Yes, I’m sure you did, since I doubt you forget anything — that also comes out in your work,” and he said, “I don’t see how, though eliciting an answer to that would only be self defeating in another way, even if I can’t specifically say how on that one right now either”—how he does this, that, some other things. “But I’m repeating myself now,” the man said. He’s in the same field as Gould—“which you must have figured out by now”—and he said, “No, but I’m often a little dense, so I hadn’t.” “And I’ve had a sprinkling of success, you can say, both critical and financial, and once even a brief torrent that drowned my house or at least flooded my basement, so maybe even more success with one of my works than you ever had. But you’re right: what the hell’s success anyway? And now I’m just about finished — I barely get in a smidgen of work in a month — while you, and we’re not so many years apart, seem always to be toiling, judging by the amount of your work I’ve seen around the past few years, or is that mostly old trunk stuff taken out and freshened up and aired?” and he said, “No, I throw out everything that didn’t work or got too old,” and the man said, “That’s the way to do it, discard the old, bring in the new, every day a bonne année, isn’t that so? But I’d like to talk about a few things you’ve done particularly, and if nothing else, since we probably haven’t time for too much—” and he said, “It is getting late; in fact, I’m an early get-to-bedder, so it was late for me when we began,” and the man said, “Then just for a minute the Zanzibar piece, which is the main reason I called you anyway, to let you know how much I loved it — that I desperately wanted to tell you that and to discuss it; to me, it’s a true work, one that seizes my throat and continues to hold it — and, if possible, to delve into the particulars of it a little,” and he started to say, “I don’t think we have the time,” but the man immediately began to say what there was in it that even Gould might not be aware of or have intended, “considering how remote our subconscious is in relation to our exterior or, at best, our subcutaneous creative selves. By the way, do you go along with anything I’ve said so far or am I simply sounding like a pedantic ass on his high horse?” and he said, “What in particular, of what you said, did you mean?” and the man said, “Anything; subconscious, conscious, the receiver occasionally understanding the work better than the giver, for a variety of reasons,” and he said, “I don’t know, possibly. Excuse me, I’m not trying to be ingenuous, if that’s the right word … disingenuous? No, ingenuous, at least for what I want here, but it’s because I’m feeling a bit tired — that business before of its being late for me,” and the man said, “Then one more thing and I’ll let you go,” and immediately began analyzing the Zanzibar piece, and Gould cut him off and said, “That wasn’t what I had in mind and I swear to you that everything I put in I intended. I don’t like to leave room for interpretation or error, but there I go talking about what I hate talking about and have no feel for and think is self-defeating, et cetera,” and the man said, “Even still; though while we’re on that subject—” and he said, “Of what?” and the man said, “The possibility of misinterpreting a piece, would you mind my speaking of one or two things — just one, then — of what else I’ve come up with in a couple of your non-Zanzibar works? And I had to look hard to find them, I want you to know. There may be a lot of you spread around over the years but they’re mostly in out-of-the-way uncatalogued places, so the search wasn’t easy,” and he said, “Okay, just one. And I don’t mean to sound curt or rude or anything, but because of the time — well, you know — so go on.” “Modality” the man used in his first sentence on one of Gould’s earliest works, and he said, “Excuse me, wait, that word,” and the man said, “Which one?” and he said, “It could only be one — modality. I’ve heard or read it ten to twenty times in my life and have looked it up in the dictionary a number of times, and even then I didn’t get what it meant, though I probably went over and over the definition each time I looked it up,” and the man said, “The state of being modal,” and he said, “And what’s that?” and the man said, “It relates to ‘mode,’ the actual and unadorned word ‘mode,’ but in logic, music, statistics, and other places,” and he said, “Okay. And ‘monad’? That’s another one, as long as we’re on the mo’s and I have the ear of a guy who seems to be good at this,” and the man said, “Now you’re referring principally to philosophy; Greek, in particular: the one and only, and I say that in both definitive ways. But please, don’t try and fool me, Mr. Bookbinder, although that’s only one more thing I love in your work: the humor,” and he said, “I do try for it sometimes, but as I already said, I hate talking about my work in any kind of way, though I thank you for calling.” “And you’re very welcome. But listen, before I go — and I am going — maybe, since I also live in this city and am now semiretired so have plenty of spare time on my hands, and that we have similar interests and pursuits, and for most of our lives, I’m sure — it has been that way with me — we could—” and he said, “Really, I’m pretty much a solitary guy. I didn’t even want to have a phone. I’d rather do all communication like this through the mail or the building’s intercom. But someone insisted I get one,” and the man said, “Let me guess who.” He was about to say, Really, don’t bother, when the man said, “A girlfriend, or woman friend, we’ll call her, because for guys our age or thereabouts, ‘girlfriend’ would be anachronistic. And she’s divorced or separated, besides probably being quite beautiful and intelligent, and has a young child and wanted the kid to be able to be in touch with her at all hours — meaning when this woman friend’s staying with you,” and he said, “Something like that. You don’t know her, do you? I mean, this couldn’t be why you know so much about it. This isn’t her husband, by chance, whom I’ve never met — only kidding again,” and the man said, “I can see that, and of course it’s no to all your questions. I’m just an avid admirer of your work, I’m sure one of many, even if most haven’t emerged from behind their walls yet, and particularly of that Zanzibar piece, which was something, truly something. And I felt like passing that info on to you personally. People have done that to me with my work. Phoned me out of the sky-blue—ring ring—you must know how it is,” and he said, “Honestly, never,” and the man said, “Then good, you’ve been initiated tonight with me: ‘Hello?’ ‘Is this Bernhard Goldstone?’ ‘Who’s this?’ ‘I simply had to phone you, Bernhard’—as you noticed, I never once called you by your given name. I didn’t think I had the right to, since I was the one to phone you. ‘And that your work has really done something to me, Bernhard’—one even called me Bernie straight off the bat, something I wouldn’t even allow my siblings to do. Anyway, I was usually thankful when I received such calls. Why wouldn’t I be, so long as I wasn’t being rung up during a horrible hangover or intestinal flu, let’s say, or something more flagrant? And it used to happen regularly for a number of years, though I don’t want to give you the impression it happened that often. But not recently, since I haven’t had anything out in the marketplace for a long time, and it could be that the people who would normally call think I’m dead or very ill. But still, once every six months would be the average, someone would feel compelled, as I was with you, to look my name up in the phone book — and wait’ll you get in it. I wager you’ll be swamped, relatively speaking, the next year or more, and then it’ll gradually recede once the caller-admirers learn you’re not exactly welcoming their interest with open ears. Word gets around quickly among them. You can’t imagine the little fan cells that spring up for almost everyone in our stratum and then, if they’re not nourished, dry up.” “Well, you’re different from me in how you handle it, which is fine; besides that, it’ll never happen once my phone’s listed. No ungratefulness intended, but you’ll be the anomaly. Anyway, it’s late now—” and the man said, “My gosh, nearly one. Does your watch also say that or is mine running very fast? Even if it were only half past twelve, who could have believed it? I meant to be brief — a minute of your time, two. All right, I won’t lie — I’m unable to — five, but at the most. I didn’t think you’d mind. Someone calling to extol you and your work? How often does that happen? With me, as I said, around every six months, when times were good. And I didn’t think I’d be the first on the phone to convey it to you. If I had thought that I would have also thought you’d welcome the call even more, for who doesn’t respond positively to an affirmative first? Later you can get jaded,” and he said, “Could be that you’re right. Thank you, and I will now have to say good night,” and the man said, “I should too,” and went on for another ten minutes, Gould couldn’t find a place in the man’s talk to interrupt and hang up: what he’s done, where it’s been, why he isn’t doing much of it anymore—“If you talk about wells, mine hasn’t so much run dry as been poisoned by someone’s having plunged a decomposed goat down it”—how there are similarities not only in their ardor toward what they do, or, for him, did, but in the subject matter too and often in the most minute particulars, “Though know I’m not suggesting you’re copying or pilfering from me in any way. Because of our similarities, you could toss the same charges back to me, but to be honest about it, I think you’ll find I was there before you. It’s simply that we’re both extremely serious and ardent at what we do, though we’re also quite funny in our work, though tragic too, which is another thing. One piece of yours — I forget where I found it, but it kept me up part of the night it was so vivid, sad, and searing and familiar — not to my work, I’m saying — even if I recall thinking at the time that I’ve tackled similar themes, though in the end how many are there? — but to life in general. What the heck was the name of it again? I’m sorry, but it’s on the tip of the tip of my tongue, just busting to cut loose, a short title — actually, all your titles are short; not all, but a lot I’ve come across, but anyhow — since I can’t remember the title or where I first saw it — know what it did to me: literally knocked me for a figure eight. So thank you, Gould, if I may call you that,” and then started right in on something else about another of Gould’s pieces — this one he has to admit he didn’t care for as much as the last one he mentioned, “though it was still pretty good”—and then his own work.

The Plane

They’re on a plane, whole family and him, he’s sitting with his wife in the middle bulkhead seats, had to maneuver to get them once they were in the air—“We asked for bulkhead, middle or ends, it didn’t matter; the woman at the ticket check-in said they were filled, though we’d requested them months ago when we made the reservations; now I see nobody’s sitting there, would it be possible?”—kids sitting about eight rows back in two seats together by the window; they didn’t want to move up just to face, as his older daughter said, a cloth wall; dinner’s being served, predinner drink glasses with crumpled-up peanut bags and cocktail napkins inside them have been taken away, first he smelled the food, thought it was from up front and now turns around and sees the food cart being pushed and pulled down the narrow aisle by two flight attendants some five rows behind the kids so about fifteen from him and his wife, only bad reason for sitting here is that they’ll get their dinner last and he’s really hungry, thought when they moved up — this wasn’t why they did it; it was to get more leg room for his wife: “She needs all the room she can get because of her medical condition,” he also explained to the chief flight attendant; “her legs need to be extended or they stiffen up on her and become hard to bend back, and I also wouldn’t mind more room in these tot chairs, I almost want to call them; what does the airline think, everyone who flies on these planes is five feet or less and svelte?”—he thought they might have a chance to be served first in economy, since the section on the other side of the bulkhead, the entrances to it curtained now, is for business class; on their way to Paris, was last there with his wife and older daughter when she was almost three, remembers the spaceship and plane merry-go-round near the metro in the Marais where they were staying, once she found she could move the ship up and down with a lever inside she didn’t want to be taken out of it, it first frightened them when they saw her suddenly rise and glide, but then they kept buying these strips of discount tickets for it day after day; their younger daughter only experienced Paris “from the interior,” he liked to say, and even teased her about it during the drive to the airport: “Starting tomorrow you’ll be able to hook up the visual Paree of today with the aural of old,” his wife was six months pregnant with her then, they spent two weeks there after a brief lecture tour he had in Eastern Europe; this time it’ll only be for a week, less, six days, even less than that since tomorrow he expects they’ll be so tired because of the time change that they’ll spend most of the afternoon in bed; they’re scheduled to land at nine, which to them will be 3 A.M. Baltimore time, and they probably won’t get to their hotel for another two hours — when he hears from behind what sounds like, “Smoke, smoke … over there!” then a woman shouting, “Hey, there’s a lot of smoke back here, get the pilot, tell the captain!” then several people shouting from the rear of his section, “Smoke … fire … it feels burning hot, coming from the cabinet there … flight person, get the extinguisher!” someone falls on top of the food cart trying to climb over it, “Get that fucking thing out of here!” a flight attendant yells, two attendants throw open the business-class curtains on both sides and run to the back, “What’s going on?” his wife says — she has a flight headset on, is listening to music, doesn’t seem to have heard any of the shouting—“Don’t worry,” he says, but she can’t hear him even with the headset off, so many people are screaming now, “What?” she says; “Kids,” he yells to where they’re sitting, but can’t see them over the seat backs in front of them, stands on his seat and yells, “Kids, come here to Daddy right away, come quick, emergency!” “Fire! Au feu!” people are shouting in back, more attendants and what looks like the captain run past his wife with extinguishers and other equipment but get stopped halfway up by people in the aisle, “Let us through, everyone back to their seats, mouvez, mouvez,” this man who could be the captain’s saying, “don’t panic, no panic, be calm, sit down, asseyez, seet, seet, everything will be okay, but out of the way, out of the way before I have to toss you out of the way”—rear’s almost all smoke now—“Kids!” he shouts, still standing on the seat but still not seeing them; “Where are you? Show me you’re hearing me!” fire coming out of the rear center wall now behind which are the toilets; are they in them? is that why they’re not answering him? “Fasten your seatbelts everyone,” an attendant’s shouting, “seatbelt signs aren’t functioning; everyone be calm and in their seats with their seatbelts on so we can clear the aisles and douse the fire,” he climbs over his wife into the aisle, “Stay here,” he says, “Where can I go with my legs?” she says, “the children, get the children,” “That’s what I’m finding out,” tries going up the aisle but it’s jammed with people trying to get to the front, glass is smashed somewhere, sounds like a window, nobody’s doing that, they can’t, he thinks; “We’re going to die,” people are screaming, “help, someone save us, do something!” Just push through, he thinks, you can do it, just force or squeeze your way around them but get past, stands on an aisle armrest, “Watch out, I’m jumping!” he shouts, jumps over a few people, and lands in the aisle on someone a couple of rows up, stands, explosion from in back, more glass breaking, freezing air gusts through the plane, sending people’s hair and ties flying, fire’s suddenly snuffed out, rear wall’s not there anymore, it seems, or the toilets; lights flitter and then stay off except for the little aisle ones that might not be lights, cabin’s almost black, outside mostly clouds, slim penlight beam goes on from a few rows away, everyone now seems to be screaming; “My darlings,” he yells, “tell me where you are. Please, shout for Daddy!” feeling he’s shouting over the others, “shout for me, shout so I can get to you, I know I’m close,” thinks he hears one of them near yell “Daddy!” but there are other kids aboard, some the same age, then a loud crack, lights below him go, metal sawed and ripped, plane seems to be spinning, things flying around hitting him, he’s thrown to the floor, then onto some people in seats, his head seems pulled off, can’t hear, eyes go, wet but with oil or blood, is stabbed in the side, please no pain, he thinks, for me and my kids, just confiscate, then nothing else. Next thing he knows he’s in the water floating. Or on something, that is. This is important. Find them. Feels around — he can feel; it’s a board, some floating device or part of the plane that floats. Maybe the whole plane but no, it’s like a jagged plastic raft in water, he sees, about the size of him across, and no one else on it. Stars, no moon, though when he last looked out the plane windows there was still a little daylight. Debris, a man’s body, that jet fuel smell, almost no waves or sea sound. “Kids,” he shouts, “it’s Daddy, yell out if you hear me!” Screams their names and his wife’s. “Can anyone else hear me? Is anyone alive? Y a-t-il anyone ici?” Yells and listens, yells and listens. Hears a bird once but sees none. How far are they out? Too far to be found. How’d he escape? He has his hands and legs and doesn’t seem hurt. That puncture, and feels his side, but must have been nothing, the only part of this in his head. Blood on his lips, maybe running down his face, but so what? Feels okay but wants to die. Can’t live through this even if he does. But first has to see if they made it. Knows they didn’t. But try, you never know. Even if he only sees their dead bodies, he can jump in and grab hold of them and sink. Tries paddling the float around with his hands but it won’t go anywhere, or that’s what it seems. He’ll have to wait till things bump into it or, if he hears one of them, swim. Tears at his hair, digs into his cheeks, and shrieks, thinks, Get done with it, and rolls into the water. Cold, and grabs the float as it starts moving away. Can’t get up, no strength to, but that’s not true, and hoists himself onto it. “Kids!” he screams, “listen, I’m strong, give me a chance. I’ve this float. Though if I have to I’ll swim us all to shore, Mommy included, but you got to yell out you hear me.” Hours of this, whole thing’s hopeless. Pissed he has to think about how cold he is, but maybe in the long run it’ll be worth it if he freezes to death by morning. Then lights in the sky, first like satellites or slow meteorites that don’t disappear and then two headlight beams. Later, as the beams get nearer, helicopter sounds. A voice from the sky, but can’t make it out, something about “anyone” and “ocean” and “plane.” Then, when the lights get much closer, crisscrossing the water, a man over an amplification system saying, “We see debris, is anyone down there? Attention, attention, we have come to rescue you, Flight two-eighteen, make yourself known. Do you have lights? Can you make yourself seen or heard? A gunshot or lit cigarette lighter will do. We don’t speak French — no parle français—so listen closely to the English. Do you have an instrument that can make a loud sound or any kind of light? Don’t shout or scream. It will be a waste of energy that can be used for later, as you can’t be heard over our rotors. Wave. If you have a shirt on, take it off to wave.” He doesn’t want to be saved. But maybe his wife and kids were picked up in another spot. One part of the plane could have gone down here, another part someplace else, but he’s sure he was near his wife and kids when it happened and they all must have gone down together. And if he survived, others could have. Maybe all of his family, or just two or one of them, but that’s something, more than enough to live for. “Hey, hey,” he shouts, “down here. I got lots of energy,” pounding the float hard as he can. Searchlights from what now seem like two helicopters continue to crisscross the water. He has his shirt off by the time they fly over him and he waves and waves. The lights pass him and crisscross the water around him with the same amplified voice saying that if someone’s down there to do something to be seen or heard. Then they turn around and get near him again with their lights, and he waves and screams, “There are people down here, plenty, so stop, stop. My wife, daughters, me, other passengers. We’re all down here waiting for you except for a few who might’ve drowned.” “We see you,” the amplified voice says. “We’re coming down; stay adhered to your craft.” A helicopter hovers about fifty feet above him, search-lights from the other helicopter beaming directly on him, and a man descends in a basket attached to a chain. “Miracle,” the man says when he reaches him. “We didn’t think there was a chance in Hades anyone could live through this; that we’d even find a body, though we got two,” and he says, “So there’s nothing, no reports from other search teams of anyone else alive?” and the man says, “You kidding? That baby you were on blew up at more than ten thousand feet and must have caught fire and started diving about ten thousand above that. Our rescue mission was strictly routine, what we have to do for even foregone lost causes. I’m still pinching my cheeks that you’re really here, and you don’t look an inch scratched. But you were with someone on the flight — maybe your whole family, that it? — I can tell by your face and in what you said. I’m sorry, truly sorry for you, fella, but now we gotta get moving. Sea’s smiling pretty but it might suddenly toughen up and I don’t want us both swept in.” “Go without me, no regrets,” and pushes the basket with his foot so the float drifts away. The man shouts for him to come back; then the basket’s raised, the man gets in the helicopter and on the amplification system says for him not to be a fool, “Stay where you are, don’t get blown off by our blades, and we can still pick you up. We know what you’re going through but we’re running out of fuel and can’t spend too much more time here trying to convince you.” He jumps off, stays underwater awhile, comes up behind the float, and tries hiding with his head just below the top of it. One helicopter goes, another hovers near, a single searchlight beamed on the float, the man practically pleading with him to appear if he’s not frozen or drowned by now and let them save him. After about ten minutes of the man talking to him like this, he says, “Sir, if you are still there, this has to be it. Sorry we couldn’t serve you better but we got to go in or we’re dead eels ourselves,” and the helicopter stays another few minutes before flying off. He climbs onto the float, freezing, and continues the trip to Paris. The landing’s smooth, customs is easy, and there’s no line at the currency-exchange window or for a taxi. Highways are clear and the fare and time it took to get to the hotel are half what the driver said they’d be. Room’s ready, but they have no jet lag so they take a long walk through the neighborhood, go into cheese and delicacy shops just to smell them, visit a thirteenth-century church for its stained-glass windows, and then go to the Rodin Museum. They lunch in the garden there, everything’s reasonably priced, and because his wife’s in a wheelchair and he’s the one pushing her and the kids are under eighteen, they get into the museum free. Later, dinner at a brasserie around the corner from the hotel, bottle of champagne on the house for a reason the restaurant owner is never able to explain to them in English and they can never quite get in French. Everyone they meet so far has been gracious and helpful, the kids are loving the trip and glad they came when at first they didn’t want to go. Weather’s pleasant, street outside the hotel’s quiet, room’s clean and spacious and with a bathroom large enough for the wheelchair to make a complete turn in and a rimless shower his wife can roll herself into on a special chair. Kids in one bed, he and his wife in the other, “Almost one of life’s perfect days, eh? — except for the brief delay in the plane taking off,” and she says, “Really, couldn’t be better. I just know it’s going to be a great visit.” They make love and in the morning they all breakfast downstairs and then go to the Musée d’Orsay.

The Wash

He puts his laundry into the basket, detergent, his keys — where are the keys? found them yesterday under the newspaper after he looked for about ten minutes, finds them now where they should be, on a hook by the front door; how come he doesn’t just automatically leave them there every time first thing when he comes in? that’d relieve him of a few anxious minutes a couple of days a month, a thought he’s thought plenty before — rings for the elevator, it comes straight up from two or three floors below, so hardly any wait, good, and he gets on it and goes to the basement and the laundry room there. He can see right away when he walks in — lids are up — that several machines are free. He was hoping so; chose an hour in the afternoon (half past four) when he thought most tenants would have done their wash by now. Takes the free machine closest to the bank of dryers, because then there’s a shorter walk with the wet clothes to one of them, puts in detergent, never measures it, just dumps in what he thinks is a capful, shuts the lid, and sticks his hands in his pockets for quarters. Dammit, why does he always have to forget something? Now it’s upstairs and down and back up again; now it’s more waste of time. Elevator won’t be there waiting for him. It’ll probably be on its way to the top floor and he’ll have to wait for it to come down. It’ll probably make a few stops on the way up and down before it reaches him, and another five minutes of his day will be lost because of a dumb mistake. Think, think, stupid: keys, detergent, laundry. Goes to the elevator with the detergent, and sure enough the red light by the button’s on. He pushes the button; five minutes lost in getting the quarters could turn into ten or twenty or even more if he misses the last free dryer by a few minutes when his wash is done. That’s happened. Were any dryers free before? There are only four of them — should be more for a building this size; there are about eight washers — but he forgot to look. But even if they’re all free now, they can all be taken in thirty minutes, and by one person: he’s seen tenants lugging shopping carts stacked with huge bundles of dirty laundry, enough in them to fill all the washing machines, or close. If the dryers are taken — there must be plenty of tenants who realize that three to five in the afternoon is the best time to get a free machine — he’ll have to wait till one of them stops and then take out the dry laundry, if it is dry. If it isn’t, does he take it out anyway and put it on one of the tables there? Can’t do that because the person will probably want to send it through another thirty minutes; it’s what he’d do if his stuff was still wet and what he’s done a few times too. He’s always putting too much laundry into the machines to save on the costs, though less in the dryer than the washer since all his clothes are made of cotton and he’s afraid the hot air will shrink them. Or maybe it won’t be that bad. There might be several dryers free and nobody making a beeline to them; that’s happened too. Anyway, remember the quarters next time, and more than you need in case the washer takes them but doesn’t start. Elevator door opens, he hopes the L button light isn’t on, it isn’t (on the lobby floor the rider has no control over the CLOSE button; the car just stays there with the door open for about thirty seconds), and he presses 7, rides up, unlocks his door, shoves the detergent inside, and with his foot keeping the front door open he stretches in and grabs a 35-millimeter film container filled with quarters off one of the hallway’s bookshelves, elevator door’s closed by now but car’s still there — well, he had to get lucky sometime today — and rides downstairs, inserts the quarters, and washer starts. Did he put detergent in? Thinks back, sees himself pouring it in and then closing the lid. Goes to the dryers; they’re all running. That could be good, if nobody gets to them before him or at least to the last one, because by the time he comes back here they’ll all be done. He can tell by the lights on them that several washers are going, but lots of people don’t see to their wash as punctually as him: a half hour, give or take a couple of minutes, after the machine begins. If there is only one dryer free when he comes back he should quickly stick the quarters in, close the door, which starts it running, and then get his wash out of the washer and put it into the dryer. But why get so desperate? Bring a book or the rest of today’s paper and his glasses with him and, if all the dryers are going, sit on a bench or a table here and read till one stops. He goes to the elevator and presses the button. He doesn’t have his watch on — he usually does, or in his pocket, to see the time he started the wash so he can put his laundry into the dryer in thirty minutes right after the washer stops — but the watch is only one more thing to remember to take with him, and he can estimate the time pretty accurately by looking at his watch or clock first thing when he gets upstairs. If there was a wall clock in the laundry room it’d make things easier, but he bets the landlord thinks it’ll get stolen. The elevator stops in the lobby, the usual thirty seconds, maybe some people are getting on or off. Though lots of tenants, to make sure the elevator stops for them in the lobby or because they don’t know how the elevator system works, press both the UP and DOWN buttons, which means the elevator stops there before going to the basement if someone down here’s rung for it. Door opens, car’s empty, so people must have only got off in the lobby or else are waiting to get on when it returns from the basement — anxious perhaps about going down there alone if it’s a woman or someone old or a child — since the L button light’s on. Crap — pressing the CLOSE and 7 buttons — if only he could go straight to his floor without stopping as he did before. Elevator stops in the lobby. Woman gets on, young, nice face, intelligent looking, smiles and says hello, and he says, “How do you do?” and she nods at him and looks at the floor indicator above the door and then presses the CLOSE button. “Forget it, it’s got a mind of its own for this floor,” and she says, “I found that out but am always hoping,” and he says, “Hope has no influence on the car’s programmed instructions.” She presses the CLOSE button again and door closes and he says, “Don’t worry, it’s because of nothing you did,” and the elevator goes up. “Thirty seconds minimum, more like forty-five, I see. Probably, because there’s only one elevator for this end of the building, to pack as many of us in without crushing our shoulders with the closing door. Anyway, some engineer or time-and-space genius has figured it out. By the way, you have the time? Just want to make sure I get back to the laundry room in thirty minutes. So few dryers down there,” and she says, “I’m fortunate; apartment I’m in has a washer and dryer together,” and he says, “One of those one-on-top-of-the-other units? Who’s that? You subletting?” and she says, “Shh, I’m not supposed to tell because she’s not supposed to be doing it, and I no doubt already said more than I should have,” and he says, “Don’t worry,” as the door opens, “I won’t snitch. What floor you going to?” and she says, “Oh, goodness, I completely forgot: five. I’ll get off at yours and walk down,” and he says, “Why? Ride,” and presses 5, then rests his finger on the OPEN button to keep the door from closing. “Is it Rose Grange’s? Haven’t seen her in a while, and she’s the only one I know on five,” and she says, “You know Rose well?” and he says, “Mostly through a man she went out with a couple of years ago. So I got to know her vaguely, and after they broke up, mostly for going-up-and-down-elevator and bumping-into-in-the-neighbor-hood and lobby talk,” and she says, “You mean Larry Tutman?” and he says yeah, and she says, “Awful what happened to him. But aren’t we keeping the elevator too long?” and he says, “Wait, though; what happened to Larry? Haven’t seen him in a year. We weren’t great friends, but I knew him and heard he left the city. Probably got a college job because I know he was looking hard and he seemed to have all the academic credentials for it. He get sick?” and she says, “Worse, much worse. It’s so bad I don’t even like talking about it. And excuse me but I’m still worried about our appropriating the elevator when someone might be buzzing for it,” and he says, “No one is. Button light would be on. If you don’t mind, would it be okay if I ride down with you while you tell me about Larry?” and she says, “Then you’ll have to go all the way to the lobby after it stops at five. There’s only one elevator button per hallway, so it doesn’t seem to go up from any place but the lobby — and the basement, of course, because from there it has no other direction to go,” and he says, “Only if someone in the lobby or any of the floors lower than yours has pressed the button first. Anyway, it’s no big deal for me to go to the lobby and then up again — but do you have the time, a watch?” and she gives it, and he lets the door close and says, “I’ve twenty-five minutes to put my laundry into the dryer. Not a useful piece of information for you, unless your own machine breaks, but that’s how long the basement washers take: thirty minutes. Same with the dryers,” and door opens on 5, she says she feels uncomfortable being the first to tell him about Larry, and then goes into what happened. He says, “It’s shocking, I can’t believe it; of all people for it to happen to,” his finger on the OPEN button. “He was such a peaceful, good-natured guy. I’m sure he was walking away from it or trying to mediate the situation — something like that but certainly not provoking or inflaming anything — and that kind of reaction or well-intentioned interference can enrage some people, particularly idiots and misfits. What’s also puzzling is why Rose never told me — she knew I knew and liked the guy. But how’d you know him? Through Rose?” and she says, “Excuse me again but someone on fourteen wants to use the elevator. Maybe I should ride up with you to your floor if we’re going to continue the conversation,” and he says, “First, though, and I don’t mean to sound funny — I only want to prepare you for this — we’ll have to go to fourteen and any other floor above or below us before we press seven,” and he presses 7, “for only after that will the elevator stop at seven.” They go up; no other button lights go on. She tells him how she knows Larry—“Even before Rose.” A woman with a dog gets on at 14 and they’re silent till they get off at 7, and while they’re standing in the hallway in front of the elevator she says why she thinks Rose didn’t want to tell him about what happened to Larry. He says, “I don’t see it, though maybe you’re right. But listen, I have about twenty minutes before I have to take my laundry out of the washer, could I invite you in for coffee or tea? My apartment’s right over there, same J-line as Rose,” and she says, “Then I can probably find my way around it blindfold. They’re all alike except for things like bookcases people had built in them. I’ve already seen 4-J and 6-J—6-J mostly to complain about his rock music a few times, so I never got past the foyer,” and he says “Hallway?” and she says, “If you like. And 13-J. And I have some time and I’ll remind you about your wash if you forget. You have—” looking at her watch, and he says, “It’s all right. Minute I get inside I’ll check the clock,” and they go in, talk—“We use the same detergent,” she says, “how about that?”—they’re both interested in literature, music, and art, each knows people the other knows besides Larry and Rose and several tenants in the building: a woman he worked with, a man who’d been in the same doctoral program as she though a few years before her, a couple of poets. “I have no cookies or anything like that, can I make you toast?” and she says, “No, I’ve had it for breakfast and lunch, the latter in a sandwich, but thanks.” He asks her out for dinner tonight, “something simple, maybe Chinese.” She says she’s busy, but not tomorrow, and she’s had so much Chinese food recently, but there’s a Japanese restaurant a few blocks away she wouldn’t mind trying. They make a date. They start seeing each other regularly and then almost every day. She says he can do his laundry in her apartment from time to time, especially when he’s having dinner at her place, but her machines are half the size of the ones in the basement and he only likes doing his wash once a week, “though saving on the cost of it is appealing.” They sleep with each other in a few weeks. He wanted to do it sooner but she said she’s had a number of unsuccessful relationships the past two years and she thinks part of the fault is she got involved too quickly. “Let’s know each other more, do you mind very much? Even if you do, I’ll have to insist.” He forgot his laundry that day he met her. They talked for about an hour, laundry never came up once she mentioned his detergent when she entered his apartment; about three hours after she left, he remembered his wash and got on the elevator with his container of quarters and pressed B and the button light didn’t go on and the car wouldn’t go farther than the lobby. He got off and asked the night man on duty why the elevator wasn’t going to the basement and was told the laundry room closes at eight. “I thought the sign on the laundry room door was ancient and those weren’t the hours anymore,” and the man said, “If you look carefully, sir, you’ll see the sign says till seven. But the Tenant Association had it changed to eight two years ago.” He went down at seven-ten the next morning, ten minutes after the laundry room was scheduled to open, and his wet wash was in a pile on one of the tables and two of the dryers and about half the washers were running. Good time to do the wash, he thought, but who can get it going so early? It’d mean gathering the laundry, quarters, keys, detergent, and when the wash was done all the dryers might be taken. Maybe one solution, if he was unable to do it late afternoon, is to put the wash in between seven-thirty and eight at night and then come down here at around this time to stick the wet laundry into a dryer. That night on the way to the restaurant he told her he got so absorbed in their conversation yesterday that he forgot about his wash entirely, and she said, “That’s to my credit, I guess, though I don’t know if I should feel flattered or if it connotes any rapport between us. But what’d you do about it?” and he told her, and she said, “I’m sure that’s why Rose got her own washer-dryer, besides the fear of going alone to the basement at any hour. I’m not afraid of that, though I’d never set foot in there after seven.” They get engaged, married, have a child. First she moves into his apartment a week before Rose returns, and when she’s eight months pregnant they buy, for emergency washings of diapers and other baby things, a portable washing machine that operates out of the bathtub. They now live in another state, teach at the same college, have a second child, a small semidetached house in an area that has what’s considered the best elementary school in the city, a washer and dryer in the basement, and in the backyard during the warm months an umbrellalike clothesline the wind sometimes spins around when there’s little to no laundry on it. He goes to the elevator and presses the button. Door opens, car’s empty, and he gets on and rides the elevator from the basement. No button lights on below 7, so it goes straight to his floor. He does some work at his desk, a half hour later brushes four quarters off a bookshelf into his hand — the film container of quarters is just too damn heavy in his pocket — gets his keys off the hook by the door, pulls a paperback out of the bookcase and sticks it into his back pocket, and goes to the basement. His washing machine has just finished its spin cycle and clicks off when he walks into the laundry room. Now that’s timing! One of the dryers is free, nobody else down here to use it, so his good luck continues, he thinks. He drops the wash into the laundry basket, which he left by the washer, squeezes the basket into the dryer, and turns it over so the laundry falls out. He puts the quarters into the slots and pushes the change part in but the dryer doesn’t start. Sometimes he gets nickels mixed up for the quarters and the hallway was fairly dark when he got them off the shelf, and he looks and they’re all quarters but the dryer now takes five of them instead of four. Since when? Maybe it’s just this one — when they were repairing it or something they changed it — and he looks and no, they’re all now a buck twenty-five. He’s got to go upstairs for one quarter? The elevator won’t be waiting for him, et cetera. Another ten minutes, or five, but anyway, more time wasted. Oh to have the dough to buy a washer-dryer, some small compact unit, to avoid all this. Some day maybe if he stays in this building that long. Even if he doesn’t. He hates having too many possessions but this would be one — well, it’d be much larger — but, like his stereo system, that he’d move with him wherever he goes. Elevator comes, a woman gets off dragging a larger than normal laundry basket with enough laundry in it for three loads. Good thing he got here when he did, and he gets in and presses 7. Damn, he thinks, going up, should have tried borrowing a quarter from her. And shouldn’t he have helped her drag the basket into the laundry room? No, she chose to do all her wash at once — he likes to too, but he wouldn’t do it if he had so much — why encourage her to tie up maybe three machines and later all the available dryers? He could have borrowed the quarter from her after he helped her with the basket, but then she might have said something like, “Keep it, you earned it,” if she had an extra quarter — for so much wash, she had to — and he would have protested, saying he’ll give her the quarter when he comes back to get his things out of the dryer or he’ll put it in her basket if she’s not here then and if she leaves the basket — and all that would take more time than it would to get the quarter from upstairs and return here. He goes into his apartment, gets a quarter, and rings for the elevator. His quarters, he thinks, riding downstairs. He never should have left them in the slots. But nobody’s going to take them or at least not in the time he’s been away. They’re still there — the woman has four washing machines open and is putting laundry into all of them (probably whites in one, colors in another, delicate stuff in a third, who knows what in the fourth? maybe more colors or whites or both if that laundry is already dulled or stained) — and he puts the fifth quarter into the slot, shoves the change part in, and the dryer starts. Set the dial for HEAVY; it’s now on LOW — not that he knows what the difference is (heat, time, speed?) or thinks it’ll change anything — and he does that. Now if he’s really lucky the elevator will be waiting for him. He runs to it; it’s there and he pushes the button, door opens, he presses 7 as he steps in, no other button lights are on, and he rides upstairs. So, for an incident that — more than an incident, a job that mostly didn’t go well — it seems to be ending okay, and what else could go wrong? His laundry could be damp when he gets back to it because he put too much of it into the machine. And maybe this dryer is the weakest of the four or only works for twenty minutes, or twenty-five, tops, and the moment it stops, and he’s not down there, someone waiting for it might empty his things onto a table and put his own wet laundry in, and by the time he returns to the basement all the dryers might be filled. So he should get back in twenty-five minutes maximum, feel his laundry, and, if it’s still damp, or most of it, insert five quarters into the dryer for another thirty minutes. For sure he’s going to remember to put five quarters in his pocket before he heads back. In fact — unlocking his apartment door — put them in now and more than five, and he closes the film container of quarters and drops it into his pants pocket. Then he checks the time, deducts two minutes from it, makes a cup of tea, reads the newspaper, and about twenty-five minutes after he left the laundry room he goes downstairs. All four dryers are running. He doesn’t see his laundry on a table, looks inside his dryer and recognizes some of his clothes. He opens the door an inch, waits till the machine stops, feels several articles of clothes and a thick towel, and they’re thoroughly dry. Should he shut the door and let the dryer finish its cycle? No, everything’s dry, so any more heat will just start to burn them or dull the colors. He hears the elevator door open, sees the woman come into the room with her big basket and go to the washing machines. He smiles at her — she nods back and opens a lid of one of the washers — and says, “This dryer will be free in a second and there should even be a few minutes left on it,” and takes his basket and then the laundry to a table and starts folding it and putting his clothes and linens in two separate piles.

The Barge

She receives a letter from a friend in Paris. He won’t beat about the bush by saying how-is-she he-is-fine. He’s dying of a most aggressive cancer. His medical men say he has a couple of months max. He wanted to tell his dearest friends this. He feels they have a right to know now rather than find out he’s dead two months later. He doesn’t want them to be sad. Please don’t be sad. This is what happens also in life. How’s that for an instance of original wisdom and great sentence structure? The drugs and rays haven’t made him any sharper, which is why he’s going cold turkey starting tonight. That ought to liven up his life and he sort of looks forward to the fight. It should be better than just lying or laying here doped up. But he realizes a certain sadness is inescapable from his dearest friends. What’s not for him is death by this illness. And what a time for it to happen. He finally has the most adoring beautiful child any father could hope for. And he’s so deeply in love with his wife. Words can’t convey how much. Or should he have said “the depth”? He’ll go through another kind of deepness pretty soon. Actually he won’t. His time-for-humor line backfired on him. Because he’s already made plans to go up in smoke and be sowed over the Gobi. No Gobi. He only wrote that because to his hollow ears it sounded good and he thought she might appreciate it. All those ohs. But his ashes to be left “in the very best” instead of stinking up the landscape. Let the owners of that contraption hose them out or sell them as fertilizer. And he probably didn’t have to put quote marks there but somebody else close who doesn’t know French might be reading this. But then she’d explain about the crème de la crème. Oh, he’s so funny these days. It perhaps takes an overnight stay in the death house to get that way. But only to her and his wife. Well, his wife he’s not writing to, but to everyone else who might possibly take it the wrong way, he’s starkly sérieux. And just days before the fatal prognosis he decided after thirty years of dabbling what to do with his wife. He of course means “life.” That slip had no conscious intention behind it. And he could have moused out the w and inserted the l but he wants here to be completely honest when he isn’t trying to be humorous. To sell the barge and apartment and buy a farm on the Marne. That’s true about the Marne. He didn’t decide to settle there and do his life’s final hard work just because of the rhyme. To go back to what he did as a kid with his Minnesota grandfolks. Did she know his dad died of the same disease? Or did till he put a bullet up his nose. Oh the ohs. And he would have written that as “ose” but her eyes might have mispronounced it. How could she have known? It was his family’s deepest secret and dirtiest shame: the disease and the rhinocide. But there are no more controls. He doesn’t quite know why he said that, but to her it’ll be clear. She was always so bright. He’s a naked baby in the North Woods. It’s winter and he’s wailing and his grandfolks are dead and his mother’s helpless and he wants to be held and saved. But God is also what they say and miracles don’t exist and science is all, he’s afraid. It is what he always believed in, so why now misgive? But he shouldn’t try to get poetical. He never liked poems much or understood what most of them meant. Even Richard Cory, if that was his name. Is he underscored or quoted? But he asks if it’s possible that loving and understanding and even quoting poetry could have prevented his disease? His dad only read the Bible and socialist newspapers and auto mechanic magazines. His mother died a diseaseless death and just did farm chores for her in-laws and babbled on zigzaggedly since his birth. But he’d like to think that about poetry because it’ll mean she’ll live healthfully and long. Now he’ll try to be tout à fait serious. What she meant to him then and since. If there’s one besides the one he hates parting from, she’s it. This can’t come as a surprise. She must have seen it in his worshipful silence. No one could have been finer and softer and more intelligent to look at and beautiful to talk to. Permit him this trip through memory’s enclosures. He loathes that line and most of the afore. But time is tight so too late to take them back or change them even with an automatic switch. This all spills out topsy-turvy unrehearsed. Bike tour through the Loire with her with little picnics of the proverbial off the road. Picking grapes alongside other Beaujolais guest harvesters and for their wages after three days a bottle of champagne and six of nouveau. She saw the beauty and exuberance in it while he mostly felt swindled and the sweat. Goading him to climb Montaigne’s tower in Castillon when he wasn’t inclined to shlepping up any more steps. That he got that word from her: shlep. And of course his barge through the Seine and Saône canals. She was such a great first mate. Teasing him into riding to the top of the Tour Awful. Ten years here and too disdainful to do it till she pressed. To act like a tourist? Her body. Her breasts. To hold them from behind at night till he slept. Is he being inordinately mortifying and naughty? Excuse him, and for the rest, but it’s a last man’s request. Her light hair against the bright and other sights? If he only had it in him to creatively say the old things a new way. His letter’s getting druggy from the dope. He should have written when he was limpid and the disease wasn’t evident yet. Isn’t it intriguing how the most devastating effects often lie in repose? It corporealized in a month and won’t be around in three. But he thinks he said that, so this will have to do it. The keyboard suddenly looks green and the mouse seems to be eating cheese. So much for his serioso attempts. Is that how to spell it and should he have italicized? Who’s got the time. Should he have used there a question mark? And it was she who truly introduced him to music and its vocabulary. He doubts he’ll be answer to able her if she writes back. That slip was unwitting and does she think it portends anything ulterior? His energy’s receding and his hair and flesh have waxed and waned. He’ll have to spend most of his time left duking it out with the pain. So sorry to end on that dopey note. So many apologies and so’s, but he’s sure she understands. Now if it’s all right he’ll say goodbye. If he hasn’t made it see-through how he feels, he deserves to die tonight. So long. “So what do you think?” she says; “but first, while it’s still in my head, do you know what limpid means?” “Nothing to do with ‘limp.’ That’s the mistake I used to make. ‘Lucid’ and ‘intelligible’ and words of that order I finally remembered after about five or six times looking it up.” “Never saw or heard it before. But what do you think about the letter?” “What is it about your breasts that men want to hold them from behind while they sleep?” “Who else but you two? And you about fifteen more years than Jock. And I don’t really recall him ever doing it, though since he said he did I guess I have to believe it.” “I like to because it means I can squeeze into you barefront from behind, smell your hair, put my mouth against your neck, fiddle with your nipples till they’re erect, though not in a way where I’m keeping you from sleep. And I’m also warmer in bed in that position and seem to dream better and clearer and a lot more often about sex.” “You didn’t much care for the letter, then.” “It’s sad and I’m extremely sorry for the guy, of course. It’s horrible, what he’s going through and still has to face. And his kid and wife and plans and to be cut down at that age and everything, but what else? Things he said about you and the way he said them?” “Your disapproving expression and shaking your head and shutting your eyes as if you couldn’t stomach much of what you were reading.” “I did that?” “You did.” “Okay, I was just a bit discomforted the way he waxed so womantically and all those sentence rhymes and that unpunctuated, except for the period and I think a hyphen in there, short line-at-a-time business. Once he got on that streak did he feel he had to complete it? So I thought it curious, that’s all, to dabble in these mannerisms in his farewell address. But that’s petty of me — and I wasn’t being cynical, or didn’t intend to be, with that ‘farewell address’ remark. He could have written it that clipped-line way — this must be the reason; the rhymes might’ve come naturally — because it was physically easier and he was weak.” “You’re holding back.” “Why would I? I’ve nothing against the guy. Time I met him here and when we stayed on his barge I liked and admired him and could see why you would’ve been attracted to him and so forth. A six-foot-two rugged and muscle-bound galoot and world adventurer, unlike me and most people I know. The barge near the Place de la Concorde, canal trips on it, West Point, holy hell Tet Offensive experience, living with New Guinean aborigines on the beach, then with hippies in caves in Crete. I don’t know; am I putting together right the people and places and residences? But a multitude of exploits, one dealing with camels in deserts, another for a dolphin and porpoise show, lobster boats in Maine, and logging and bear wrestling in Washington, before giving up stateside forever for the untried France. Who doesn’t think about tossing it all overboard? But few have the guts to. And it didn’t come from contacts or money; did it all himself by working hard. Comes to Paris sou-less and in a year he’s got a barge and made a killing. He was a gentle rough guy, right? Man’s man, that sort of stuff, loved sports and a big drinker, but so what? And that mop of competing blond, and so full, though now, poor guy, he says it’s falling out from the treatments. Sunny face, great looks, blue eyes that reminded me of a movie star’s, and he liked to read and sculpt and cook sea urchins and things, and what else? I don’t know why you didn’t hook up with him longer, get hitched, have kids, and so on.” “He got pissy when he drank too much, and was often too moody, and drew away. Too many times I knocked on his door when he was on a bender and he told me to get lost. In the end he simply wasn’t right, and in many ways we were too different. Our backgrounds: his for three generations was army and Wisconsin and no rabbis in the family; mine for the same amount of time running away from or getting murdered by Cossacks, Nazis, and Poles. And his love for lit was mainly genre and the good books in old-school translations. But I never appreciated him more than in that letter, though you could be asking me now why I showed you it.” “I’m not, I’m not, for why wouldn’t you? I’m your husband and I knew all of it and it was way before my time, so who cares?” “I also thought it was brave of him to say what he did and put his language and lyricism out on the limb like that. Out on the limb? What am I referring to here, a scribbling squirrel? Anyway, maybe it was something else that annoyed you. Not so much that once, for a few months, we actually loved each other — Jock and I — but that he reflected so tenderly and touchingly on it.” “Tenderly and touchingly? What about bombastically, turgidly, ponderously, long-windedly, and unlimpidly? Let’s face it, sick as he is, and I swear I feel nothing but the deepest sympathy for him — compassion, horror, the rest of it — did he have to resort to such flatulent phrasing and in such excess? You want to tell someone how much she meant to you and that you still care for her a great deal — I mean, those were great times, and this, as he suggests, is probably his last letter to you — then you do so without using such hyped-up overripe language. Because that was supposed to be poetry? Because that’s what he was trying to do, you know: a sort of last-pitch winning you over once more in the kind of writing he knows you love best — the form; whatever the all-embracing word for poetry is.” “You’re way off on this, Gould, way way off.” “You think so? Then let me run through it again. ‘Dopey note.’ That one I know by heart. Oh the ohs, indeed. ‘Slip was unwitting’ and did it portend—portend? — something untitting?” “He didn’t say ‘unfitting.’ And a perfectly useful and unarchaic word, ‘portend.’ You’re being a stinker and very crude.” “But you get my point. So he didn’t say ‘unfitting.’ But why ‘corporealized’ instead of ‘materialized’? That’s what he meant. Or even something simpler. But fancier the shmancier, it seemed.” “‘Corp’ is the body and ‘material’ isn’t, or not as much. And he was stressing the body, wasn’t he? — my breasts, the rest, and his own body failing him. I forget where he used it or how, but that could have been it.” “Maybe. Okay. You’re much better at figuring out literary meanings than I am. ‘Keyboard suddenly looks green’ isn’t egregious. Same with the mouse eating the cheese. In fact they’re good imagery and sound for someone getting nauseated or nauseous or just stomach-sick and dizzy. But the ‘limpid.’ And I’m not going to work entirely backwards here or include everything he wrote, I want you to know.” “That’s a big relief. Let me celebrate by going into the kitchen and drinking a glass of water.” “But you yourself had problems with the ‘limpid.’” “You letting me get by or do I have to inadvertently, which I’d never do, run over you?” “By, by”—stepping aside and following her as she wheels into the kitchen—“Need any help with the water?” “You’ve done enough, thank you. I’ll manage.” “Listen, all I was saying before was couldn’t he — even just to avoid giving the impression he was trying to impress you — said ‘clearer’ for ‘limpid’? That way you wouldn’t — and he knows most people would do this, if they were interested or intellectually or linguistically curious, as you’d certainly be — wouldn’t have had to ask what it meant or go to the dictionary if no one was around who knew it.” “It’s conceivable he thought I knew.” “Then it was to impress you that he did too, or is that too far off base? And believe me, it was only by chance I’d seen the word in a few places, and through some kind of tenacity it finally sunk into that ooze of a brain of mine and I remembered what it meant. Otherwise, I bet right now you’d be looking it up.” “Look, when you’re being a bastard, self-deprecation doesn’t work to reverse or temper it; nor, from before — that ‘as you’d certainly be’—flattery. And if you have seen the word so much, then it must be in plenty of books, and I’m talking of contemporary ones, and even newspapers and magazines, nullifying your argument that it’s so archaic or abstruse a word.” “Maybe that’s true. Maybe you’re right. Anyway, to get on with my examples, or whatever they are or what I’m trying to do here — and I’m not trying to be funny now—‘So much for serioso attempts.’ I changed it from the original just a touch, but let’s look at that one. I can see it’s a play on what he previously wrote about wanting to be starkly serious and seriously stark and so on, but Why’d he suddenly venture into music? Spreading his artistic wings because he knows bringing in music and with an Italian term would also appeal to you?” “So he brings in music, so he brings up poetry, so it’s Italian, so he includes a little French. The French, of course, because he knows I speak it and will catch how he intentionally mangled it and he’s lived there for more than twenty years, so it’s sunk into his ooze, and Italian music directions because most of them are in that language.” “It’s also another oh.” “So? What do you have against them? And he called attention to his self-conscious use of them, so I doubt he was furtively alluding to, with so many ohs, and which you might be accusing him of, anything orgasmic. And the music? I did, through my appreciation of it and because I also once studied piano seriously and usually when I found an available piano in Paris I practiced on it, get him interested in more serious music than what he liked till then, country and blues and jazz. Same with poetry: my love for it. Though he was less willing to take it in, even if for a while — and not just for my sake — he read it voraciously and in several languages.” “Okay, I’ve nothing to argue on that, though I still see the poetry and music references as enticements to you of sorts. As for the orgasmic allusion, it never entered my head. But that’s what I meant about your being — and I’m not trying to flatter you — a much better reader than I. But this line I liked a lot, the getting druggy from the dope. It cleverly undercuts the seriousness of the painkillers, and it was forcefully put. But ‘The most devastating effects often lie in repose’? That true or only in there because he thought it sounded philosophically smart? But moving on — and I’m skipping a lot I could as easily go into—‘Your light hair against the bright and other sights’? What happened to heights and slights and right is mights and tights, blights, bites, and other kites? And while we’re talking about poetry—” “Give me back my letter, please.” “First let me go over—” “I said to give it back!” and she grabs for it and he pulls it away and, when she looks startled, hands it to her. “What is it with you, Gould? I don’t see what you have to be so threatened or envious of. Nor do I see why you couldn’t have unobjectionally accepted this last man’s dying request, as he said.” “I remember that one; near the beginning, I think. It wasn’t the line I was about to comment on, but I’m sure I would have got to it eventually.” “But why, that’s what I’m asking? He’s dying and you’re healthy. He’s probably in terrific pain right now, maybe worse than when he wrote the letter, and you’re not; you’re feeling good and healthy. He has one child and is wretchedly sick and you have two kids and are very much alive and healthy. You have a good job, retirement if you want in ten years, and you’re healthy and active and will no doubt be then, the way you take care of yourself, and he’s dying. I’ve got my own disease to deal with, and that surely doesn’t help you. But I’m not dying, it’s not life-threatening, I can still take care of myself mostly, so it’s not going to do you in or sap that much of your time and physical energy, and soon he’ll have no wife and child in any medical condition because he’ll be dead. Am I making myself clear? Why don’t you try examining why you sniped at almost everything he put in that letter?” “What’s to examine, in that sense? I feel terribly sorry for Jock. I know I said that, and by repeating it it might seem I don’t mean it, but I do and that’s the truth, but I was just going over his letter as a psychotherapist might go over his patient’s thoughts, line by line. That’s not an accurate analogy, since you never asked me to dig into his letter so thoroughly. Then what then? Just that I saw in a single reading, and perhaps incorrectly, what I thought he was getting at in certain places and found that curious and commented on it, that’s all, which was no doubt insensitive of me and for that I apologize.” “That’s bullshit, or only half of it, but you go figure out which half. Meanwhile, no letter, and I mean never, not for me to read or you to pick apart again,” and she rips it in two and those pieces in two and a couple of those pieces into more pieces, and when he says, “What are you doing? And look at the mess you’re making,” tries ripping up some of the smallest pieces but can’t. “Listen, you’re going to tear something up, at least keep all of it in your hands before you throw it away.” “Now what’s that, disapproval now of my inability to tear something up nimbly because of my unsteady hands? Are you insane?” “No, to both,” picking the pieces of paper up off the floor. “But you only hurt yourself — you know that — because I’m sure you wanted to read it again.” “You mean I didn’t hurt you?” “No, I didn’t mean that. Want these?” She shakes her head and he drops the pieces into the trash can. The rest are on the kitchen counter and in her hands. “Some advice: what you should have done if you didn’t like anything in the letter was just silently shut up. Now I can never forget how you acted and your mean spiritedness to Jock and me.” “Okay, I should have, and you’re mad and don’t want to talk about it anymore, so I’m going for a walk. To the store, really.” “I wish I could do that, just say so long and slam the door in your face. But I can’t, so go; nobody here will stop you.” “If it’s the kids you think one of us should be home for, I’ll stay and you can get in your cart and scoot out.” “What’s that supposed to mean, another crack?” “No, it meant — forget it; everything I say gets misconstrued. And you can only go out certain times, after certain preparations — I realize that now, so I’m sorry. So I’ll see you.” “As I said,” and she turns away. Should he go? Go. Right now, nothing he can do or say if he stays. He goes. While he’s walking to the store he thinks it’ll soon blow over, two days, three. Tonight in bed she’ll put one of her two pillows between them, if she doesn’t sleep in her studio, and if he asks what’s the pillow supposed to mean — to her sleeping in the studio he won’t have to say anything because she won’t come into their bedroom — she’ll say, as she’s said before when something like this has happened, it’s more comfortable for her back, and he’ll say, “Oh, yeah,” and she’ll say nothing to that and probably nothing to him after, no matter what he says, except maybe, “If you don’t be quiet I’m going to sleep in the studio.” If he tries to hold her breasts from behind in bed — well, he won’t try because he knows she’ll take his hand away. But after the two to three days she’ll start acting normally to him again — he’ll never have stopped acting as if just about nothing had happened — and he’ll say he wishes, and maybe this was the problem, as she said, that over the last thirty to forty years he’d had some of Jock’s confidence and derring-do and so on, made greater changes in the direction of his life a number of times, did this, risked that, gone to West Point, even, or Annapolis, or at least into the service instead of doing all he could to stay out of it; when he was a student hitched from Cairo to Cape Town as he’d planned to with this South African girl he’d met in Europe, and later on France for a few years, as he’d intended, rather than a few months and then back home the moment a good fellowship came through, which he didn’t expect to get; hippies in caves only maybe, beach life on sunny Crete he’d like, for months down to nothing but shorts and crummy sandals and T-shirts; aborigines in New Guinea — he doesn’t think so if it meant they had bones through their noses and treated diseases with things like bark and leaves, but would she believe he’d actually, when he was around thirty-five, thought of living in the capital of Papua for a year to write and be far away from the States but someplace exotic nobody he knew had been to and few had even heard of? He doesn’t think he ever told her that last thing about himself, one of the few things he hasn’t: the research he did for the trip and shots he’d started taking for it. But now he’s in late middle age, and even if he didn’t have the responsibilities he has at home, adventrousness like that would be so transparent and he’d feel like even more of an outsider in one of those places than he would have then. So that’s what prompted his attacks, and maybe something to do with her illness: that Jock only knew her when she was completely free of it and also much younger. He gets a few things at the store, nothing they really need but just to make his excuse for leaving the house more believable, and in case she hasn’t noticed — he won’t say this but maybe she’ll pick it up — he’s the one who shops, cleans, cooks, provides, gets the kids off in the morning and to their music lessons at night and so on, comes home, and says, “The girls back?” “Look at your watch; it isn’t even three yet.” “Then I wasn’t gone as long as I thought I’d be; I didn’t really get anything. Listen, I’m sorry, very sorry for what I said; it was all the awful things you said it was, so will you forgive me?” “No, nor myself for giving in to the emotion of the argument and tearing up the letter so you wouldn’t quote from it anymore. You showed yourself so ugly. I don’t care if you were jealous of Jock with me or of the life he led or whatever caused it, even what I think is his damn good writing. At any age, what you did was a disgrace. To resume anything resembling even dreary living with you will take I can’t say how long, not because you’re dull but your attitudes and responses and what you find funny sometimes and free to be cavalier and blunt about are so insensitive and passé.” “Excuse me, but does everything you say correspond?” “What do you mean now?” “Nothing. I got it wrong. But you sure got me, baby, you got me good.” “You’ve done that routine before, at least a dozen times.” “Then whew! is what I really wanted to say, and no routine; I swear, nothing like that. You let me have it and right on the pupik and deservedly so, besides covering everything I thought of saying to you while I was coming back from the store.” “Yeah, whew, Mr. You-know-what Artist,” and goes into her studio and shuts the door. He goes to their bedroom, time to lie down, he thinks, and lies on the bed and shuts his eyes, maybe a quick nap will help him see the whole thing better, hears his older daughter come home and yell out, “Is anybody around?” and his wife say, “I’m in here, darling; I’ll be right out,” thinks, Was I, as she said, in addition to everything else, envious a little of Jock’s writing? Truth is, some of the lines weren’t that bad. Too late to retrieve them from the original but let’s see if any — this will also be a test of his memory and the staying power of the words — comes back. Richard Cory? Surely he knew that was his name. But the “diseaseless death.” And “died of a diseaseless death” it was, which had a nice rhythm to it or whatever it had that made it stick and sound good. “Naked babe in the North Woods”? That was sweet and, again, nice rhythm. One understood right away what he meant and pictured it immediately. And the stuff with the mother holding him or he wanting to be held was touching and could have been more if he wasn’t so critical at the time, and he knew that when he read it. But not the “wax and wane,” though maybe he’s missing the boat there, since Jock was referring to his flesh and hair. But he definitely liked the swindle and sweat. And that it rhymed on the next line with “shlep.” And other things: “farm on the Marne,” which actually sounds too much like “Spam in a can,” and “what he did as a kid with his Minnesota grandfolks.” So the letter was strong, he has to admit, for the most part evocative and strong, particularly the quick autobiographical reminisce and his trip through memory’s enclosures. Nice job, Gould, well done. So he was wrong, he was wrong, he was wrong, he’ll have to tell her but not today, and that perhaps it was the good writing coupled with the intensity of Jock’s memories about her that set him off, besides the guy’s great life till this horrid thing hit him. So why didn’t they stay together longer? His other daughter comes home; he hopes she doesn’t barge in here, as right after going over this he wants to nap. Couldn’t have been just the drinking and Jew and Gentile, could it? Maybe he was also a stinking lover or had some sexual problem or dysfunction. He’d never ask her. He wouldn’t know how to put it. And if he did find a way, she’d say, “At one time I would have told you, though only if you had asked first. But now, after what happened, I can’t, and I’m not saying by that that he did or he didn’t or was or wasn’t. It just isn’t something I ever want to tell you.” He’ll leave it at that, never bring it up again, not even years later when this whole incident will have just about been forgotten by her.

The Bed

His mother died in his arms. “You shouldn’t keep telling people that,” his wife said. “It sounds as if you’re boasting.” “But she did die in my arms. At home, in her hospital bed there. I was holding her, had her propped up.” “I know; you’ve said. But from now on with other people, when you’re telling them about it — this is only a suggestion — just say she died at home. Peacefully at home, because that’s how you said it was, except for that last terrible moment which she might not have even been aware of.” “I’m sure she was; I saw it when she opened her eyes after they’d been closed so long.” “That could have been involuntary; some automatic physical reflex. You raised her up, she started vomiting, her eyes opened.” “But it was what I saw in her eyes that made me feel she was suddenly conscious.” “All right. I’m not arguing with you, sweetheart. But the thing with your arms — which is true, I’m not disputing that either, if the way you say it happened happened that way.” “What other way could it have? It’s not something I’d forget or make up. I was there with the woman who takes care of her weekends.” “Ebonita. I know all that too. And she seemed as devoted to your mother as the woman who looked after her during the week.” “I was sitting beside my mom. Ebonita pointed out this phlegm rising in her mouth. It was white and loose, almost like water, and a little bubbly. Maybe it wasn’t phlegm, I now realize. Some other juices from inside, but we thought it was and a good sign because we’d been trying to get the congestion out of her chest for a day. Raising her, trying to get her to cough up. But there was a lot of this stuff right below the top of her lips, just staying there. She’d been having trouble breathing for a day and I didn’t want to take her — send her, have an ambulance bring her, I mean — to the hospital, because even the doctor said—” “And he was right. Of course, he should have come over and seen her to say this, but he was still right. All they’d do at the hospital is stick needles in her, try to keep her alive for another day, if they were lucky, and maybe even help get rid of her before she would have normally passed away at home. But we’ve gone over this. What I’m saying now, though, is that some people might think this is just another terrific story you’re telling. Not ‘terrific.’ That the dramatics of it is equally important or even more important to you than what you were feeling at the time and are no doubt feeling something of now.” “I feel terrible, as low as I’ve ever felt. Or did feel that low for a few days and now just feel terrible, almost as low. And just talking to people about it, and right here with you—” “I know, dear, I know, I’m sorry. But you still don’t want to convey the inaccurate impression that you’re focusing on certain aspects of what happened to make it sound more interesting. In your arms. Hugging her and crying out the things you did at the end. Who wouldn’t want his loved one to die in his arms like that: peacefully, for the most part? Not in a hospital where they shoo you out of the room at precisely that moment or a little before and then come out later and say she’s gone.” “That’s why I didn’t call EMS or that Haztollah or whatever that ambulance service is to take her to a hospital. I knew she was going. The doctor, from everything I told him, said so over the phone, and she’d been declining for a few weeks, and it was clear to Ebonita and me that this was it. I wanted her to be comfortable at home. She’d told me long ago that that’s what she hoped for also: no tubes, and to die in her own bed. Well, it wasn’t her own bed, it was this nursing service loan of a bed. And it wasn’t even in her own bedroom, it was her dining room converted into a bedroom so she could be taken care of better, but at least it was her own home. And, she said, surrounded by — well, there was just me and Ebonita there and some old ghosts, maybe. Dad, my brother who didn’t live till what, five? but did live in that apartment his last two years. I’m sure she would have wanted you and the kids there — but that couldn’t be, and I wouldn’t have wanted the kids to see it — and the main person who took care of her, Angela, but she was off for the weekend and we couldn’t reach her by phone. And also Ebonita’s daughter, just sitting there in a chair in the room and not looking scared or saying anything, just curious, as if this were an interesting new thing she was seeing, though Ebonita told me her daughter had been in the hospital room the moment her own grandmother died. So maybe that was it, reliving it, but I think more out of not knowing what to do and curiosity, the death and the way I was taking it. I didn’t know how to tell her to leave, go to the kitchen, take in a movie, anything, but get out of here, please, this was a private moment for me, the worst there was; or for Ebonita to tell her—” “You were right; Ebonita should have if the girl didn’t have the sense to leave herself. How old is she?” “Fifteen? Seventeen?” “Then old enough to know. And I can see why you’d be unable to say something yourself. Anyway, dear, I overheard you talking to Frederick about your mother and thought I should say something to you.” “He asked me how I was. He’d called to make a lunch date. He didn’t know she’d died. So I said I was feeling the worst I’d ever been in my life, and then — after he asked — that it was because my mother had died on Sunday.” “You said she died in your arms on Sunday.” “So that’s what I said, then.” “And that’s why I brought it up. But of course do what you want. I just felt I had to point it out.” “Okay. I’ll remember. You’re probably right. Anything else?” “No, nothing. I’m making myself tea. Like some?” and he says, “No, thanks,” and she grabs his hand and squeezes it and looks up at him sympathetically, he fakes a quick smile, she says, “I understand,” and wheels herself to the stove to get the teakettle. He should help her, but he suddenly feels in his throat and eyes a cry coming on and wants to be alone. He goes into the living room and sits but no tears come and the swelling in his throat and the itchy feeling around his eyes go away. What’s that mean, he’s finally adjusting to his mother’s death? No, he’s sure he’s in for a few more bad days of it. The tall memorial candle’s burning on the fireplace mantel. He brought it from New York, something the funeral home gave him along with several cardboard boxes to sit in mourning on, all of which he left behind but one, and lit it the day after they drove back from the funeral. So it’s been lit for more than two days and seems to have burned less than a third of the way down. His wife wanted him to put a dish under it but he said, “Why? That’s for regular candles when the wax is dripping. This one’s inside a long glass cylinder, and it couldn’t be safer, because the lit wick gets lower down the longer the candle burns.” She said the glass might break, burning for so many days—“Have you felt how hot it is? I did, just as a test, and wish I hadn’t, or had licked my fingers first, for it burned me”—and he said he knows it gets hot, he doesn’t have to touch it to find out, but he’s sure that that glass is the kind that won’t break from such a small flame, because when she felt it did she also see how thick it is? He gets up and touches the glass; it’s hot but didn’t burn his fingers though would have if he’d kept them on longer, and maybe the heat from the bottom of the glass will do something to the mantel wood when the candle burns way down, but he has about three days for that. Where’s the camera? and sees it on the piano and, using the flash, takes a picture of the candle for some future day when he may want to remember exactly what it looked like, Jewish star and funeral home name on it and everything. It could also turn out to be an interesting photo, a few condolence cards and the little Prayers and Meditations book, which he took off a side table in the funeral home sitting room her coffin was in, lying beside the candle, if maybe come out looking too much like the front of one of those cards. He opens the book to “Yizkor in Memory of a Mother.” What’s Yizkor mean again? Not “again”: he never knew. Certainly not “may,” which seems to be the translation in each of the seven Yizkors in the book: “For a Wife,” “For a Son,” et cetera, and one just “Yizkor Meditation.” The prayer in the book he likes best, or maybe it’s a meditation, is “At a Mother’s Grave,” but the book stayed in his pocket at the burial — the rabbi did all the reading — and he’s only read the prayer to himself in bed a few times before reading a couple of sad poems and shutting off the light and going to sleep. He sits on the box with the book, starts reading very low the Yizkor for a mother, something he’s done when nobody was around at least once a day since she died. But he shouldn’t be reading while sitting, should he, even on this mourner’s box? And he doesn’t want to stand up and read, or read it any louder — his wife might come in and say something like, “You, never a believer or worshiper or even someone who observed a single Jewish holiday or ritual, not even circumcision if we’d had a son, now going on every day like a yeshiva bucher?”—and reading it silently standing up or seated doesn’t mean anything. Later, when the kids are asleep and his wife is in one of the other rooms, he’ll read it or another prayer or meditation while he stands by the candle, as he’s done the other times since he’s been home. He’s cried every time while reading from the book — oh, don’t go into it. He moves to the easy chair and opens the New York Times, tries reading an Arts article, but thinks of her. He’s almost always thinking of her, or in ten minutes or so of doing something else he always seems to return to thinking of her, and sometimes of her reading this same paper, but the late edition, which she loved doing every morning over coffee till she couldn’t anymore because of her cataracts. Regrets: why didn’t he ever drive her down here to see this house? They bought it more than three years ago and she never saw it once. But he’s gone over that. She was frail, couldn’t take the train or plane anymore, four-hour car trip would have been too tiring and maybe even painful for her, it would have been too much for him to deal with, taking care of her and also seeing to his wife. Two wheelchairs in one house: in his head he didn’t like the way they looked together, especially at the dinner table and on the little patio outside, though he didn’t think it would have bothered his wife. But he could have made the car seat comfortable for her, stopped as often as she wanted along the way, driven more slowly than he normally does, taken Angela with her, put them up for a few days, Angela in the basement, his mother on the day bed in his wife’s studio, an intercom hooked up between them, or moved his kids to the basement and had Angela and his mother in their adjacent bedrooms, driven them home and then returned the same day. The last two summers when he drove back from Maine he told his wife he was definitely going to have his mother down for a few days this fall and she said it’ll be difficult but it was all right with her, and that was the last he did of it. She would have loved that he owned this house and lived in such a neighborhood: tall trees, small hills, lots of birds, and perfumy air, nursery school playground across the street and all those children’s voices, house on one level and with ramps, extra-wide doors, and a bathroom big enough for a wheelchair to turn around, hospitable supermarket nearby. Regrets: why didn’t he call her every day as he’d promised? Remembers his father saying lots of times, “When I got married and moved out I called my mother at least once a day till she died and saw her twice a week for dinner or lunch,” and his mother saying a number of those times, “It’s true, your father was an unbelievable son: almost too good, to where he neglected his own family.” He remembers thinking this was a nice thing to do and he’d do it too with the phone, once he grew up and moved away from home. He called her every other day or every third day and for the last year she frequently didn’t know who he was or took him for someone else: her dead brother, his father, a name he didn’t recognize, and when he asked who’s that? she said she’d never heard the name before and why’d he bring it up? But in a minute or so, after he kept saying, “It’s me, Mom, Gould, your son, Gould,” recognizing him and saying at first she didn’t hear him because he was speaking so softly or it was her bad hearing or the girl didn’t put her hearing aid in right this morning or the hearing aid must need a new battery or never worked right: “You’ll have to take me to the place we got it at. I forget where, but you’ll know or Angela must have it written down. But you will come around to see me soon, won’t you, dearest? I’d really like that,” and he’d say, she knows he’s in Baltimore, right, and not in New York? and weekdays there’s his job, not too demanding, but also driving Fanny to and from school, and weekends the kids always have so many things going for him to drive them to, and Sally, of course, takes some of his time, but he’ll be there in two weeks, he promises, take her to lunch on a Saturday, and she’d say, Two weeks sounds like such a long time when one has nothing to do, but if it’s the best he can do she’ll have to live with it. Or sometimes she’d say, “That was dumb of me to think you were Dad. Probably because I didn’t get enough sleep last night. All I could do was run my life through my mind and not like most of it, so aggravation there too. And also wasting away here watching inconsequential TV shows the girl likes makes me stupid and I forget what year it is and where I am. Tell me, is this my home I’m in?” and he’d say, “Your old apartment for almost sixty years. It’s just it’s a different kind of bed than you’re used to and it’s in the dining room because your bedroom was too far away from the bathroom, so maybe you don’t recognize your surroundings because of that,” and she’d say, “All that’s probably true. Though I still have a suspicion this isn’t my regular home, but then why would you want to trick me?” Regrets: sometimes he’d call and Ebonita or Angela would answer and say, She’s resting (or on the potty or sitting under the water in the shower), and he’d say he’ll call back in an hour but usually never did. Why? Because he’d think, he already called that day; his duty was done, Angela will tell her he called and she’ll be pleased by it though disappointed she missed him and later think something came up at his home where he couldn’t call back. When actually talking on the phone to her the last few years was often frustrating, where she couldn’t understand what he was saying and he’d have to shout for her to hear him, and sometimes she’d give the phone to Angela and say, “You talk to him and find out what he wants; he’s speaking loud enough but I still can’t make out a word.” He should have called back each time and, if she was still on the toilet or had gone from the toilet to the shower or bed, say he’ll call back again in an hour or two, or sometime that day, and then call back as he said. Regrets: he’d tell her he was coming to New York to see her for the day, and half the time he’d call a day or two before to say something had come up at home — Sally, or one of the kids got sick — so he’ll have to put off the trip till next week. Usually his Sally or sick-kid excuse was a lie: he didn’t want to make the trip, too tired to or thought he’d be, or he had work to do and wanted to do it at home and not on the train, or heavy rain was forecast for New York, so he wouldn’t be able to wheel her to a neighborhood restaurant, which made getting her there — which he wanted to because he found having lunch with her at home suffocating — even with Ebonita or Angela helping him, tough because he’d have to get her and the wheelchair in and out of cabs and sometimes she was a dead weight. He also wouldn’t be able to take her to the park after lunch, which she liked doing and frequently fell asleep for an hour or two there while he watched people and read. Regrets that he found having lunch with her at home, suffocating. Regrets that she slept so much when he was in the park or even at home with her the last couple of years, but nothing he could have done about that. Regrets that he didn’t take her down to the river after lunch, which he thought of doing lots of times on hot days, but it was about fifteen minutes away while the park was much closer. But he shouldn’t have disappointed her so much, since that’s what she obviously was — her voice, or silence after, or, “That’s all right, your family comes first, and maybe you have some important outside things to do too”—whenever he told her he couldn’t come in this weekend as planned. Regrets: why didn’t he initiate conversation more and follow up the questions he did ask with more questions about what she was talking about when they went out for lunch or spoke on the phone or sat in her home the last few years? The calls to her were usually over in a couple of minutes, sometimes less; a few perfunctory questions, and mostly the same ones: “How are you? You feeling all right? Eating okay? Anyone drop by lately? Do anything interesting recently?” “Like what?” she’d say. “When you’re not here, and I’m not going to a doctor with one of the girls or your lovely cousin, all I do is sleep and eat a little and listen to the radio or TV.” A couple of times he said, “Then anything interesting on the radio or TV?” and she said, “I can barely see or hear them,” and then silence on his part and after she asked him a few things about his family—“Your kids all right? Your wife okay? Does that new medicine she’s taking work? Listen,” she said, maybe twenty times, “I hear they’re discovering new things all the time for what she has; is she involved with any of them?”—she’d say, “So, I guess that’s it; I can’t think of anything else worth mentioning. Thanks for calling; you’re a doll. I love you,” and he’d say, “Same here, Mom; Sally and the kids send their love too, and I’ll call you tomorrow,” and she’d say, “I look forward to it; I always do.” Face it, he usually wanted to get off the phone with her as soon as he could. The same conversations, same difficulty in holding those conversations, and whatever he told her she seemed to instantly forget. But he should have faked it, put more life in his voice, asked friends for jokes and told her them — she liked a good joke — and laughed at the punch lines if she didn’t. Thought of lots of different things she might want to talk about, repeated what he had to say over and over till she finally got it. Prepared questions to ask her before he dialed. Stayed on the phone five minutes, ten minutes, even thought of follow-up questions to ask her, wrote all these questions down, even. She must have thought sometimes, He’s got to be bored with me by now; probably thinks I don’t understand a word he says and haven’t a brain left in my head. That I’m old so I’m demented. He’s probably only calling out of a sense of duty. I should ask him more about him and his family, not just general questions but specific ones—“What courses are your girls taking in school? How are they doing in them? Do you have to help them much with their homework? I’m sorry, I know you once told me, but what grades are they in again?”—but I can never think of this when we’re on the phone. I should also call him more, but so many times I don’t think he’s glad to hear from me. It mostly seems I’m getting him at a bad time, nothing personal against me. At the end of his calls to her, she often said, “Tell me, what’s the best time to reach you by phone?” and he always said, “Anytime after five is good; there you’re almost guaranteed I’m home. If I’m not and you speak to Sally or one of the kids, I’ll call you soon as I get your message, unless it’s way too late.” She hadn’t called him more than three or four times in the last two years, and one day she called him twice and just an hour apart, not remembering she’d already called him. “Do I have your phone number? I don’t think you ever gave it to me,” she said several times, and he’d tell her, “It’s in the little phone book on your night table. It’s also taped to the inside of the cabinet door above the kitchen phone, and I know Angela has it written down in a couple of other places in case she suddenly has to get me. But don’t bother calling me; I like calling you and I try to every day,” and she said things like, “I know, and it’s very sweet of you.” Why didn’t he ever talk to her about some of these things? “You know me, Mom, I was never much of a talker on the phone, and it has nothing to do with you if our talks are short. And if I’m relatively quiet or not too conversational, we’ll call it, at the restaurants we go to or when we’re sitting around at home, it’s only because the long train ride’s made me sleepy, or I had to get up earlier than usual for a Saturday to catch the train and get here by noon, or I did lots of schoolwork or something the previous night and didn’t get enough sleep, so there, also, it was nothing you did.” Regrets: when he came to New York the time before the last, almost a month ago — and another regret is why he didn’t come a week or two after that, or every week — and walked into the dining room where she was sitting in a chair and said, “How are you, Mom?” and she looked up, no smile, which she normally gave, that she was glad to see him, and said, “Who are you?” why didn’t he get on his knees and hug her and say, “Mom, it’s me, Gould, your son; oh, my mom, why don’t you recognize me?” Instead, he stood there, saying, “What do you mean, who am I? It’s me, who else could it be? I’ve come to see you, all the way from Baltimore, and take you out to lunch and spend the day with you,” and she said, “We’re going out? That’s nice. I wasn’t expecting it, nobody said anything,” and he said, “But I called last night to remind you and Angela, and we’ve been talking about it the last two weeks. And you’re dressed for going out, aren’t you? so you must have known,” and she said, “Then I don’t remember, but please don’t make it an issue. I’ll have to go to the bathroom first and then I’ll be ready — call the girl,” so regrets there for upsetting her. Did he apologize? He’s sure he did but forgets. He got her wheelchair—“Want to walk it outside?”; she said, “Right now I feel too weak to”—and got her into the chair, pushed her outside; “The girl; shouldn’t we invite Angela? We haven’t taken her to lunch in a while,” and he said, “Not today, I just want to be with you alone and I’m sure she appreciates the break, especially when she’s working the weekend this week too,” when it was really because Angela picked at her food and took a half hour longer to eat than his mother — turned around in the areaway, and pulled her up the steps to the sidewalk. “Want to try walking the wheelchair now? It’s good exercise for you, and only a little way,” and she said, “I don’t feel I can move a step. I’m sorry, but I don’t know what’s wrong with me today,” and he said, “Mom, come on, you should only do what you’re able to,” pushed her to the restaurant she liked going to most, table by the patio window she liked sitting beside so she could watch the people passing, after that to a coffee bar on the same block — he got her a decaffeinated coffee but told her it was regular, that’s what Angela said the doctor wants her to have if she does have coffee; he’d prefer her to stick with hot cocoa or a mild tea — another regret? No, and even though she wasn’t supposed to have a drink either, and if a drink then just a wine or beer, he got her her favorite: Jack Daniels on the rocks with a little water and twist of lemon, “Because what else are they going to take away from me,” she once asked, “food and air too?”—and a flaky Danish-like pastry she loved, with peaches and walnuts in it. She asked that day at both places and while he wheeled her along the street the same kinds of questions she usually did, and some of them several times: “You feeling okay? Your wife. Everything considering, she’s all right, no change? And your lovely daughters, they okay too? They doing well in school? Of course they are, look who are their parents,” and he said, “Sally, maybe, but not me, and I mean by that their brains.” “How old are they now? … I can’t believe it, where’d all the time go? You still teaching? You have enough money? You know, if you ever need a loan … I don’t have much but you can have it all, because what good is it going to do me? Where do you live these days? Not in New York? How far is Baltimore from here? That much? I didn’t realize. How long have you lived so far away? You don’t think, if you looked, there’d be something closer that was as good?” Another thing to regret: that he’s lived down there the last fourteen years? They kept his wife’s old student apartment near Columbia, sublet it more than they used it. Whenever they came up, though, and stayed there he saw her every day for lunch and sometimes dropped by around five for drinks and cheese and crackers. Regrets that they didn’t come up more. The drive was long and tedious for him, but he should have done it more often. She loved seeing the girls. And before their older one started middle school, when absences began counting against her, they stayed at their apartment all of June and three weeks during the Christmas break instead of what they’d done the last four years, ten to eleven days. And when she was still in nursery school and kindergarten, they came up for around five weeks and he maybe skipped seeing his mother one or two days. Then he wheeled her home, didn’t ask if she wanted to walk the chair, knew she couldn’t, helped her onto the bed—“Suddenly I feel very tired. In the restaurant I was fine. I didn’t have anything alcoholic to drink, did I?” and he said, “Let’s just say I kept diluting your Jack Daniels with water so you wouldn’t drink it almost straight and get looped there,” and she said, “Now that was a mean thing for you to do”—sat beside her a couple of hours while she napped, and then got up and leaned over her and said, “Mom, Mom, listen, I have to be going and I want to say goodbye,” and she opened her eyes and smiled and said, “Thank you, my darling,” and he said, “Thank you, nothing; it’s been my pleasure. I love taking you out and seeing you, and I just wish I could do it more often; I’ll try to,” and she said, “That’d be nice. You’re the only one who’ll give me a drink and I get to eat a good lunch and enjoy myself so much with,” and he kissed her forehead and cheek and then her forehead again — it was wet, didn’t feel warm when he touched it with his fingers. Maybe she was sweating because the room was too warm or it was the drink or it could be one of the medicines she’s taking or she had a fever. Can a forehead be cold and the body feverish at the same time? Another regret is that he didn’t tell Angela about it. Just knocked on her door, and she said through it, “Yes, sir?” and he said, “I’m going.” Maybe the infection was only just setting in and in a few weeks gradually grew into that awful hoarse cough and labored breathing — spread to her lungs, he’s saying — and was what finally killed her. “She’s been declining for months,” her doctor said on the phone the day before she died. “She won’t pull through this time, a hospital’s not going to improve her chances, so it’s mainly a matter of where you think she’ll be most comfortable. I always tell the patient’s immediate survivors that, unless there’s physical or emotional suffering involved on either side, home’s the ideal.” Then she shut her eyes, smile gone, seemed to fall back to sleep, and he got his coat and briefcase, stuck his books and newspaper in it, looked into her room, she seemed to be sleeping peacefully, thought of going over to kiss her, didn’t want to disturb her, and left. He’ll call her when he gets home, he thought, walking to the subway. She’ll most likely be up and will like hearing from him. He didn’t. Another regret. Would have been so nice. “Mom, I just got in,” she’d ask where, he’d say, “From New York, where I saw you today: I took the train, and first thing I’m doing — I don’t even have my coat off — is calling you.” No, too obvious. “Mom, I just got back from New York, where I saw you, and wanted to know how you are and if you had your dinner.” Forget the dinner. Just “How are you, what are you doing?” She’d have said, “I’m all right, I guess,” and, “Nothing, as usual.” Another regret is that he didn’t stay overnight in their apartment, come over in the morning, and take her out for breakfast or if it was raining or too cold, made her breakfast in her apartment with things he brought over and knew she liked — bagels, Canadian bacon, strawberries, Friendship pot cheese, a special fruit juice — and then left for the train. Or just stayed longer by her bed that afternoon. Read, maybe taken a quick walk. Then had a drink with her when she awoke: Jack Daniels on the rocks for him (it was the only hard stuff in the house, though he could have bought a bottle of vodka in his quick walk), a very watered-down one for her, because there wasn’t any great need for him to get home before the kids went to sleep, and it was Saturday, so they’d still be up at ten or eleven and he could see them if he got on the train by seven or eight. And the kids didn’t need to be driven anywhere early the next morning that he remembers. Even if they did, he could have called Sally and asked her to get a friend to drive them or the parent of the kid whose house his daughter was going to; that it was more important he go home later that day than he thought or to stay the night in New York and leave tomorrow around noon because his mother seemed to be getting weaker — she was definitely getting weaker and thinner and less lucid, and he wanted to spend more time with her while he had the chance. Misses her, can’t stop thinking of her. Well, it’s not as if he tries to stop. He’s just always thinking of her, or a lot. He can be doing anything, taking a run, a shower, shaving, slapping something on toast, sitting in a chair eating or reading, talking on the phone (he’s only been able to talk — won’t even pick up the phone when it rings; his kids and wife have to and then tell him who it is — to a few close friends and his mother’s accountant and the cousin who looked in on her in New York the past few years and is now going through her own mourning and calls up to talk to him or Sally about it: “How strange. I never knew I’d feel this way once she was gone. I almost thought it’d bring relief, to me and her, though I can’t especially say how, since she for the most part was in relatively good health for someone her age and I enjoyed her company, and now I grieve that I won’t be catching the One-oh-four bus to see her and stopping in a store along the way to get her a buttered soft roll,” and he said “Same here, though not the relief part. But honestly, Lottie, I can’t talk about it yet like this”), when suddenly she pops into his head, if he isn’t already talking about her, like with Lottie, and he often starts crying. He thinks about writing a poem about her. Anything: her youth, what she meant to him, times with her when he was a boy, her relationship with his dad, one composed of just phrases and things she liked to say. He doesn’t write poems. Last was a series of them to Sally a few weeks after he met her and the first time she broke off with him, titling them “2S1,” “2S2,” through “2S11” and finally “2Sdozen.” He threw out his copies of them about a year later but wonders if she kept the originals he sent her one by one after he wrote them, sometimes going outside at two and three in the morning to drop them into a mailbox. He takes out his pen and starts writing, cries during part of it, and finishes in a few minutes. It all just came. He’d stop about ten seconds between each completed sentence before going to the next. Should he write another? No, this one says what he wants. He reads it and changes only the second “laid” to “lay.” “How could my mother not be alive?/ My mother has always been alive. / I clutched her around and cried, / ‘Mommy, Mommy, it’s all right, / Mommy,’ and then she died. / I laid her sideways on the pillow / and she lay there always. / She has always been there. / When I come to this city I will / be coming to see her. / Things won’t change, will they? / How could my mother not be alive? / How could she? Things don’t change. / I’ll never be the same. / Speak to me, Mommy, speak to me. / It all goes on and I cannot stop.” He’d like to be able to — of course he would, but finish the thought — to be able to type it up, change nothing else in it, and stick the original into an envelope and send it to her. He’d like, he’d like. And Express Mail. To go to the post office and get one of those Express Mail envelopes and send it that way so she can get it early the next day. And with a note in it. Now that’s enough. But what would he say? Dear Mom, I’m so glad you can receive this, your loving son, Gould. So what to do with the poem? He tears the page out of the notebook and puts it inside the book he’s been reading but hasn’t read more than a few pages of since he took it on the train to New York the day she died. Phone rings and he yells out, “I don’t want to speak to anyone now, no one, not even my cousin,” and his wife says from her studio, “I understand, but what should I say if it’s for you, you’re not here?” Phone’s still ringing. “Say, if they don’t already know, that my mother died and I am here but I don’t feel I can talk to anyone now but her and my kids and wife. That I’m low — feeling as low as I’ve ever felt in my life.” “You want me to say that?” “Pick up the phone if you want and say anything, but please stop its ringing; the damn noise is killing me,” and she picks it up, and he quietly moves to the kitchen by her studio and listens as she says, “No, no, it’s coming along; he’s very upset, of course,” and he says, “Upset? What a word for it. I don’t know exactly what I am but I’m a helluva lot worse than upset,” and she’s probably looking his way, shaking her head, doing things like that and the expression to go with it — he can’t see her nor she him — and she says, “Please, Gould, don’t make it any tougher,” so her hand’s probably on the talking part of the receiver, and he says, “Sorry, no harm meant, but what can you expect? Though that’s no excuse,” and goes back to his chair in the living room. The cat comes in and heads toward him, and he says, “Listen, I don’t want to pet you and you’ve already been fed plenty, so go away,” and the cat gets by his feet and seems ready to jump into his lap. “Did you hear me? I don’t want that,” wagging his finger. Cat jumps up, and he puts him on the floor. Jumps right back up, and he says, “What is it with you? I know you know something’s wrong and you’re trying to comfort me but not … right … now,” and with one hand underneath he holds him over the floor from about three feet up and lets him drop. The cat scoots up onto the chair opposite him, stares at him after he settles himself, and then tucks his front paws under his chest and closes his eyes for sleep. “You understand,” he says, low, “that it’s that I don’t want to touch or be touched by my wife either for any kind of loving or solace or easement. My kids, yes, to hold them, but right now, and for I don’t know how long but I’m sure no more than a couple of weeks, I don’t want to be held. Oh, what am I saying?” and thinks he’s got to do something. Sitting here or lying on his bed or walking around the neighborhood, all he can do is think of his mother and what he didn’t do for her. He goes into the bathroom and pees, though he had no urge to, just to get up and do something. Move, move, keep busy, that’s the ticket. Folds the towels on the rack. Then folds them the more intricate but right way, horizontally in half and then vertically in thirds and then over. Then he sweeps the bathroom floor and washes it with diluted ammonia and rags. On his knees, just as his mother didn’t do; she used a mop but he can’t stand those things, the stringy ones, which you have to wring out by hand if you don’t have a bucket with a wringer, or the sponge mops they have that are too damn slow to use, where you have to squeeze them with that metal piece every two square feet of mopped floor. Rags are the best, rags, rags: rinse them under the kitchen faucet after you’re through and then throw them into the washer, though make sure you don’t wash any clothes or linens with them — all that lint. Same with the kitchen: sweeps it, then spills diluted ammonia on the floor and gets on his knees with the rags and starts swabbing. “What are you doing?” his wife says; “the smell,” and he says, “Cleaning. I feel I want — I don’t feel, I just want, and I don’t mean by that correction anything but that I want everything to be clean, tidy, neat, even sparkling. And it’s something to do, I need something physical to do.” “If that’s the case, after you’re done, the shed needs emptying out and tidying up.” “Good, will do,” and he finishes swabbing and then dries the floor with paper towels. But first finish cleaning the house, he thinks, and vacuums every room, changes the kitty litter box, remakes all the beds, scours the kitchen sink, wipes down the refrigerator and stove and countertops, takes the clothes from yesterday out of the dryer and folds them and puts them away in various drawers, cleans the toilets and tub and shower stall and refolds the towels in the other bathroom, goes outside and cleans out the shed, has a whole bunch of things from it and the basement to take to the dump, and puts them all in the van, yells out to his wife, “I’m off to the dump,” and goes. While he’s driving he thinks, Turn the radio on to one of the classical music stations, but there might be voices, news, promos, thank-yous for contributing to a recent fund drive, and so on, and he really doesn’t want to hear music right now either. He thinks his mother would have liked to come to the dump if she were here. Knows, unless she was too weak or tired to. Places like dumps, the kids’ music schools, just ordinary chores; driving in neighbor hoods she hadn’t been to before, or not for long, and especially shopping with him, and especially grocery shopping when she stayed a week or two in Maine with them each summer, she liked. A week; his wife felt that was long enough for either of their mothers, but he always felt bad sending her back to the hot city and wanted it to be more. She’d be in the front seat. Last time she was in the van was about six weeks ago when he drove her and his family to dinner at his cousin’s apartment in New York. No, last time was when he drove her home after dropping off his family at their apartment, since she lived farther downtown. She was in the backseat, because his wife had been in the front seat and there didn’t seem to be any reason for his mother to move up for such a short trip. He said something to her, she didn’t answer, he turned around: she sat frozen, it seemed, staring straight ahead past the front passenger seat. “Mom, you okay? What are you looking at so hard?” She continued staring, didn’t move. “Mom, anything wrong? you all right? why don’t you answer or look at me?” Nothing. He thought: Is she dead? Is this it, then? He reached over and touched her shoulder and neck. She seemed to be breathing normally but still stared straight ahead without moving. Should he pull over? he thought. Maybe she needs to be rushed to a hospital or for one of those EMS ambulances to rush to him. But he’s near her building and maybe she is asleep and something’s wrong with her eyes that’s keeping them open and she’ll snap out of it before he gets there. He kept looking back at her as he drove; she stayed the same; he parked at the hydrant by her building, put the emergency lights on, ran around the car and slid the side door open, and she suddenly stopped staring, turned to him and smiled, and said, “We’re home? So fast? I must have slept,” and he said, “But your eyes were open. You were staring out the windshield, or seemed to, the whole way after we dropped off Sally and the girls,” and she said, “I couldn’t have. Nobody sleeps with his eyes open, at least I never have.” He got her into the chair and wheeled her down the areaway steps and into the building — regrets that he didn’t tell Angela, or whichever woman was working that night — and also called her doctor the next day about it. He still doesn’t know why she froze up like that. Next time he sees his doctor or his wife’s — not the kids’; she’s strictly pediatrics — or meets one before then at a dinner or something, though the way he feels now he doesn’t know when that will ever be, he’ll mention it. He’d talk to her now if she were in the car. Last time they spoke she was hallucinating. It was the night before she went into a coma; next day — no, the day after that — she died. Ebonita called him; said his mother had been babbling for three hours straight, she’d never seen anything like it. About her children, husband, work, her family when she was a girl, a jump rope she played with for years; mostly, though, her mother and sister. “I can’t get her to stop. Maybe you can.” She put his mother on, and she said, “Party, party, party,” and he said, “Mom, it’s me, what do you mean ‘party’? What’s doing?” and she said, “Let’s go to a party. I want to party, party.” “Mom, it’s Gould; you’re saying you want to go to a party? What kind?” and she said, “How’s business?” and he said, “I’m not in business, Mom; I teach, I write,” and she said, “I’m going to bake a cake. First I should get out of here. I want to bake lots of cakes. I have to get up now and start baking if I’m to have the time to do it.” She was speaking away from the phone, maybe to Ebonita, and Ebonita said, “Talk into the phone, Mrs. B. It’s your son, so say something to him.” “Party, party, party,” she said into the phone. “I want to make and bake. Cookies, bread, cake.” “You always made great herb breads, Mom, do you remember? And what you called a zucchini bread, though it was more like a cake. Everyone loved it. Is that the kind of cake you mean you want to make?” “My sister’s coming today and she likes chicken the way I bake it and she loves my zucchini cake.” “Which sister? You come from a large family.” “We’ll party and party. Lizzie and Ethel, Harris and Rita. Zippie, though that wasn’t her real name.” “What was her real name? You and Aunt Zippie and Uncle Pete never wanted to reveal it.” “Party and more party. Are any of my family alive? I think they’re all gone and deceased, since I haven’t seen any of them in years. Could be they don’t want to come see me. Who would want to come see an ugly old mess. Is it fair that I’m the only one of my family left? What happened? Where’d my mother go? What’d I do?” And then more talking to herself, it seemed, where he couldn’t cut in, till he yelled out, “Ebonita, it’s all right, you can take the phone away, I want to speak to you.” About two months before that his mother said, “Tell me, and I want you to be honest”—he was sitting on her bed, she in her chair, the newspaper she couldn’t read anymore because of her cataracts, but still had delivered every day, on her lap—“how old am I?” and he said, “Ninety-one.” “No, am I really that old? How’d I get to live that long? It doesn’t run in my family. And I drank and smoked and your father made life hell for me and I lost a child and never ate right because I always wanted to be thin and for the most part neglected myself in all the other things. I don’t get it.” He told Ebonita on the phone, his mother babbling in the background: “I’m coming tomorrow to see her. I’ll get the eight o’clock train and be there around eleven. She doesn’t sound well. But you say she has no fever and is eating and urinating okay?” and she said, “Everything but the talking’s normal. And she’s eating and drinking her food like she’s enjoying it.” His younger daughter woke him around four the next morning and said she couldn’t breathe. “You mean you’re having trouble breathing?” and she said, “No, I can’t get breaths. My throat’s stuck.” They later found out she had the croup. He gave her medicine that was for his older daughter’s asthma, called Ebonita around ten and said he had to take his daughter to the doctor now, and he’d either see his mother much later in the day than he’d planned or early tomorrow, all depending on how sick his daughter and mother are. “How is she?” and she said, “She babbled endlessly till two this morning and is now sleeping like a baby,” and he said, “She talk about anything different this time? Things or people or events you never heard her speak of before?” and she said, “No, it’s mostly her mother and sister and some her father and cake and bake and chicken and such. You a lot too, that you’re her only person she can really count on,” and he said, “That’s not true at all. There’s you and Lottie and Angela and some people from the street. Don’t take it personally. In fact, if you want, and you can say this idea came from me, tell her if she can count on me so much, how come I’m almost never there? But it must be very difficult for you, tending to her so many hours straight, and I’m sorry I’m not there to help out. Anyway, it sounds as if she’s much better already, but I’ll call you later to make sure.” He called later and his mother was still sleeping peacefully, though she had sat up for a few minutes to take some special canned food supplement through a straw. “Good, that means she got some food and you got to rest.” He dumps the stuff he had in the van, goes home, parks, then, while still in the car, he thinks, There’s a road near here he’s for a few years wanted to take to see what’s around it and where it goes, but he’s always given himself excuses not to: has no time, it’s a silly or childish impulse to carry out, and so on; but do it now, and he drives to it — it’s only a mile away and he passes it on the way to the dump and back and almost every weekday when he drives his older daughter to high school — and it winds through an area with homes and woods and hilly lawns like his own and ends up on a familiar road to the main town in this part of the county. He drives home on the familiar road, since it’s the shorter route of the two, parks, and walks into the house, and his wife says, “Was that you in the carport before?” and he says, “You mean about ten minutes ago in the van? Yes, but I suddenly forgot something,” and she says, “What?” and he says, “I don’t know, something. My mother call?” and she says, “What are you talking about?” and he says, “Just being dopey, that’s all, and possibly thinking, ‘Well, you never know.’ Anyway, the last few years she hardly ever called. I called her, though, almost every day and sometimes every day for a week. I tried to call more, every single day I was away from her, really I did.” “I know, my darling.” “It would’ve been nice if she had called — now, I’m talking; I’m not concerned, or ever felt slighted she didn’t call me much the last few years.” “Of course you weren’t.” “I’m sure she wanted to but didn’t think of it. Or she thought of it and then the thought quickly disappeared. She’d never stand on ceremony with me, either — that’s a term she liked to use. But you know, that, ‘He’s the son so he should call me,’ and it for sure wasn’t that she was too cheap to call. That was my father. ‘Penurious,’ I liked to call him — I mean if I had to put it in words — though some people, including my mother sometimes, called him cheap. Oh, the trouble he gave me as a kid when I wanted to phone a friend. ‘Your father got stock in Bell?’ and so on. But my mom? Just the opposite. ‘Call when you like, but better now than when your father’s around. You know how it upsets him,’ and of course an upset for him would start upsetting her. But do you think she took that tack to sort of get me on her side and a little against him, or just to establish what distinguished them? What am I trying to say here? Help me,” and she says, “She might have been showing you she approved of a number of things you did that your father disapproved of, and certainly that she didn’t think your calling your friends was a big deal.” “She was always supporting me and my work. Is that what you meant? Probably not. And I’m not referring to money, though she would’ve given me some to do what I wanted with it, within reason and her limited budget, and often offered: ‘Do you need any extra cash?’ Even now — I mean up until maybe two months ago — and I’d say, ‘No, Mom, I’m working, so I got enough coming in.’ But before I met you, to live off of while I did these so-called artistic or creative things, or for grad school or travel, but I never wanted to take it and hardly ever did. I wanted to be Mr. Independent, and I didn’t want to be taking money she might have, with a lot of difficulty, extracted from my dad. And, after he died, money that’d make her own life a bit more comfortable and secure. He was a good guy, though, and had a kind heart; I wasn’t alluding to anything about that. Everybody thought so, except sometimes my mother. A sense of humor too — both of them — I forget who I was originally talking about there. Though she, for some reason, became even funnier after he died — real witty lines and retorts which I never remember her saying before. Let’s see, what would be one? That crack about the Jack Daniels, when I tried diluting it because I thought it was too strong for her and she hadn’t had anything to eat yet. I think I told you it. Others. ‘If I get any older …’ Something about if she got any older than she was and Stone Age culture, but I forget. And both were affectionate to me most times, my father, earlier on, more than my mother—‘A kiss, before you go to bed every night you must give me a kiss’—and never raised a hand. Well, he raised it to me several times but it never struck. But she? Not a finger, except, and when I probably deserved it, to wag. I really loved them both, though if I had to make a choice — this, by the way, was the one impossible question to answer when I was a boy: ‘Who do you love more, your mom or dad?’—it’d be she. It’s true, I’d have to say it, I never said it before, but it was she. Not because I knew her twenty years longer. She was, all in all, just nicer and more dependable and predictable and with a more even disposition, and she made me feel better when I needed to and understood or tried to understand me more. But them both, you know? I’ve no regrets in what kind of parents I had in them both.” “I know. Try not to be so sad,” and he says, “I can’t help it. I feel miserable. This goddamn crying’s a pain in the ass sometimes, when it just spurts out in the worst public places and tears my throat, but I suppose it also has its good. I should’ve got a vaporizer for her room when she started breathing poorly again a few months ago. I didn’t want to take her money so she’d be more comfortable and secure in old age? So why, when I had the chance and the income, didn’t I give her everything she needed — gone into hock doing it, if I had to? Now I look back and think, What the hell was I saving the money for anyway? I’d only have been spending her money — wouldn’t I? — when you think I’ll probably end up with a small bundle from her when the estate’s settled. Laziness, that’s what it was. That I couldn’t pick up the phone and call the drugstore nearest her and say, Send over a vaporizer, send her everything she needs or the woman taking care of her says she needs.” “You did that. The women with her could have ordered anything they wanted, and no doubt did. And it was already costing you and your mother a big bundle keeping those women there and feeding them.” “That I just couldn’t have picked up the phone every day and even twice a day, morning and night, and not mostly from my office, and spoken to her a few minutes? I had to keep it to once a day and most times not even to that? And laziness that I didn’t take the train in to see her more.” “You saw her a lot.” “Not enough. I was bored with the trip, I also found the car ride tedious, but I couldn’t have made the sacrifice more? What would it have taken? Bought some good stuff to read on the train. Or saved up, let’s say, since to me newspapers are much easier to read on trains than books, two or three days of the Times. Or the whole Sunday paper, no matter what day I left, or just the Arts and magazine and week-in-review sections — the book section I would have already read — or made myself tired by not getting much sleep the night before the trip so I’d sleep on the train most of the way.” “Now you’re carrying out these things you could have done too far, both for her and yourself, and it’s not good for you, it’s really not.” “I should have put her up in a nursing home around here — there are plenty that are good and cheerful, people have said. Closed her apartment first and driven her down, or temporarily closed it, in case she didn’t like the home, and seen her twice a day at this place, but she wouldn’t have gone in one.” “Then don’t raise it as a possibility. She was a New Yorker from birth, and even if she didn’t have any friends or close relatives there left, except for her niece—” “I should have gone in to see her the day before she died. That kills me the most: the last thing I could have done and I didn’t. But Josephine was very sick: I worried about the kid once she came into our room and said she couldn’t breathe. And I sort of made a secret decision with myself that day that I had to see to the sickly living before the dying dying. That’s an awful thought; cold, crude, awful, and something I didn’t even think then, so why’d I say it? Did I use Josephine as an excuse not to see my mother that day before? Again, laziness? No, I wanted to see her, absolutely, truly, and would have, and I thought my cousin was looking after her well or would, plus Ebonita or whoever was on”—“Ebonita was”—“but I — but my mother was ninety-one and I knew she was definitely failing, but I also wanted to make sure Josephine got to the doctor. But she would have seen me before she went into the coma. My mother. But I didn’t know she was going into a coma and seeing me wouldn’t have stopped her from going into one or dying, though it might have made her feel better for a few moments. I could have shown her pictures — longer than a few; minutes; hours. But pictures of the kids and you, photos I mean, recent ones she hadn’t seen, or just old ones of her and the kids and you where everyone looks happy and well. Photos of her parents and brother and sisters. I could have got them out of the breakfront drawers where she always kept them, kept them there when I was a kid. Of herself when she was a beauty. The same drawers. She still was a beauty, a beauty for someone her age and maybe ten years younger; she would have won a contest if there was such a contest for beauty at that age, but not on those final days. I wouldn’t have brought out the photos of my brother, no matter how cheerful and healthy-looking he appears in them and beautiful or handsome or whatever a boy is when he’s so young. And my father, of course, or maybe not ‘of course,’ since their marriage wasn’t that great. But photos of them together, just dating and in the latest styles; with friends, all of them arm-in-arm in a park once. One where she’s cuddling a dog, though when I was growing up she hated them, and where he has on these long sporty striped socks and what do you call those pants that end just below the knees?” “Knickers? Jodphurs?” “He was a rider too, in Prospect and Central parks: rental horses. And at their wedding reception. She looked gorgeous, holding what she said were a couple dozen long-stemmed roses my father got her, and he so handsome in cutaway and top hat. And one in a bathing suit; she, I’m speaking of — his legs were too thin for him to look good in them — holding an open parasol above her as if imitating a beauty contestant, and with a fashion model-of-today’s figure but showgirl’s legs. They’re all still there. I’m going to get them next time I’m in, and maybe they’ll be some of the few things of hers I’ll keep before I give or throw everything else away and close the apartment for good.” “She was very beautiful. It was the first thing my parents thought when you introduced them.” “Her skin. Did I tell you about it? Even on that last day, so smooth. Or maybe because of that day, more smooth than ever; I don’t know. Relaxed; going into death, if it’s not painful or distressing in any other way, might do that. But like someone’s — weeks before — thirty or forty years old. Or forty to fifty, better, but on that last day, thirty to forty.” “Even to have the skin of a sixty- or seventy-year-old would be remarkable for a woman her age.” “But it was much better than that. Amazingly, not many lines and none on her forehead and only a few around her chin and mouth and neck where they normally start congregating and growing when you hit fifty. Look at me. So let’s say I didn’t inherit her skin genes — for the face; her arms and hands were like someone’s her age — or my lines relate to other things. And with the plates in her mouth out too.” “I don’t follow you.” “That last day. If her dentures had been in, her face would have even been smoother, I think. But I did something that’s irreversible, I just know it. Usually the wrong things I do I can patch up, with talk or time or overcompensating later on, but these I can’t, especially that I didn’t come in that day. The previous one. The day before the last. When Josephine was so sick.” “Don’t blame yourself, darling. There wasn’t any one incontrovertibly right decision to make.” “I may even have made the right one, for all I know, but it still doesn’t help. Josephine was immediately put on antibiotics — right in the doctor’s office; they used starters. I remember running out into the hallway to get her one of those paper-cone cups of water. And I left early the next day to see her — my mother — and got there an hour and a half before she died.” “So one of the good things to look at is that you got there in time.” “Or at least before the moment we think she died. There was Ebonita and her daughter. I forget the girl’s name. What do I care that she had seen her grandmother die and so was used to it? She shouldn’t have been in the room with us. She should have gone into the kitchen during that time or taken a walk outside. But she didn’t know better, though she was old enough to, and I don’t think Ebonita did either, and there was nothing I was able to say. She was definitely breathing, though, when I got there, my mother. And for the hour and a half or so after. Hard breathing. Meaning it was hard for her to breathe — labored breaths and plenty of phlegm. And for a long time we went on and off thinking she was still breathing after that moment, but so softly we couldn’t hear it, and we also thought we saw her body moving a little. But the EMS guy who came hours later — we didn’t notify them sooner because we still thought she might be alive — said she’d been dead from about the time we’d originally said and that what we thought were signs of life was just the dead body beginning to break down and settle — I think those were his words — and the gases, or maybe that’s the same thing. I told you what he did, right?” “With his two fingers quickly on her neck and saying she’s gone?” “After, while we were waiting for the police, I said, ‘Can’t he, to make sure, use an instrument or something so we know she won’t be carted away alive?’ and he shrugged, as if saying, ‘All right, to make you happy,’ and monitored her heart with a stethoscope and pinpricked her skin and did something else with another gadget, and then said, ‘Nothing, I’m sorry, my condolences.’” “That part I hadn’t heard.” “I held her up, those moments I thought were her last. That’s not what I wanted. I mean I didn’t plan it that way — come in for it, have any idea it would happen, some dramatic moment like that — but that’s how it probably ended and the EMS guy was right. What do you think her babbling meant? She did it for almost half a day straight. I wish I’d been there to hear it.” “I know, you’ve said.” “It was like she was describing her entire life in that relatively short time, different from what you usually hear about it passing through the dying person’s mind. I would have learned — but I told you all this — stuff about her family and my dad and her childhood that she only would have revealed in the unguarded state she was in. It even could have been embarrassing for me to listen to: things about herself and my father and maybe other men before — I doubt there were any after — though Ebonita said, in that hour and a half we had together before she died, there was nothing that made her or her daughter blush or anything she hadn’t already heard. Well, she probably had told Angela and Ebonita everything, including things about me that weren’t so good — I’m saying, in the years they had looked after her. If only Josephine hadn’t got sick, but what can you do.” “It was a freak coincidence. Of course, you were frightened for her, just as I was.” “You don’t think Josephine’s illness was in any way connected to knowing my mother might be dying? I mean, we were all at dinner when I got that first phone call, and I talked to Ebonita on your portable phone.” “I don’t see it. Listen, dearest, try for a while not to think of those last two days. Or think of them all you want; I’m not sure what’s right either.” “No, you were right the first time. I’m going to rest, I think. Try to nap, anyway.” “If you need me”—her arms out—“I’m here,” and he says, “Thanks,” and goes into their bedroom, makes sure the phone’s off, and lies on the bed. “Party, party, party,” she kept telling him over the phone. Or at least said it while she held the receiver and he was on the phone. Though maybe Ebonita was holding the receiver for her and his mother didn’t even know she was talking to him or even talking on a phone. No, she knew she was talking to him, or part of the time, since she asked, “How’s business?” something he thinks she said before in relation to his work, the teaching or writing or both. He’s sure she said it before, and more than once, and one time as a joke. But what did the “party, party” mean? And she sounded so chipper on the phone, better than she had for months. “My sister’s coming and she loves my chicken and I have to bake a cake” and “buy a new dress,” Ebonita told him she’d also said that day several times. Did she mean one of her dead sisters was coming to take her away? That she knew she was dying? That the party was some idea she had of joining up with her favorite dead people in heaven or some afterlife place — her beloved mother, whom Ebonita said she went on about most, and of course her firstborn son — or some notion she had of freedom and fun once she was released from the physical discomfort and misery she’d been in for years? That the cake was what she wanted to make for the party as an offering of sorts? Or just that when you go to a party you always bring something? which is what she thought. The new dress might have meant to her — or did Ebonita say a “fresh” dress? — but anyway, a shroud or just a nice outfit to look good in her coffin in or something presentable to wear to a party. If that’s the case, what’s the chicken mean? Nothing right now in his storehouse of symbols, but maybe there was one in hers. Or the chicken was a chicken, something she baked with a coating of corn flakes that her sister did like, and that made her sister coming to her more realistic. But if this is how she approached death, then she went fairly resignedly, right? Or not anxious or frightened and maybe even gladly, and that’s a good thought for him to have. But what else did she say? Oh, don’t start analyzing every word. “First I have to get out of here,” she told him, and she wants to bake “lots” of cakes. Well, the “out of here” is easy enough to explain, not that he’d be right, but “lots of cakes”? Maybe to give everyone she joins up with in this afterlife place. Anything else she say? He wrote most of it down soon after he spoke with her, a little of it even while he was on the phone, but doesn’t remember any more of it now or where he put those notes: probably in his top night-table drawer, but he doesn’t want to look: what’d be the purpose? Her arm thrashed a lot that last hour and a half and for a few hours before that, Ebonita said, and always the right. So, she was a righty, and what’s it mean anyway? — it’s all involuntary. His dad’s thrashed for two days when he was in his last coma, and maybe in the coma before that, and both arms, back and forth in front of his face and sometimes crossing but never hitting each other. When he tried to hold them down they’d push up, and his dad’s face showed pain or intense frustration at that moment, so he let them go, hoping his father wouldn’t hurt himself like breaking his nose. He called her doctor the day before he went to New York, and the doctor said that from everything Ebonita told him and the visiting nurse said about her, she’s failing. “I’m afraid she’ll never leave the hospital this time if we send her there.” “Alive, you mean,” and the doctor said, “To be absolutely frank about it, yes. The decision’s ultimately yours, though. But if I were you I’d get to her side quickly and try to make her as comfortable as you can at home. If you need to reach me for any reason, call day or night, though I don’t think you’ll have to except, perhaps, for a pep talk. I’m sorry, Gould. Your mother was a brave woman, but you have to remember we never thought she’d last this long, and from my conversations with her she didn’t think so either.” “Why, what’d she say?” and the doctor said, “I forget, but something, since she was always a pessimist regarding her longevity and health.” After that phone call he remembers thinking, What’s the guy talking about? She’s not dead yet. That whole last-nail-in-the-coffin business, which they also used on his father, is a bunch of hooey. His father pulled through three or four of them after the doctors gave him just a few days. He said to the doctor this time, “There is a problem, though. My younger daughter’s sick with a bad croup and my wife’s unable to drive her to a doctor or hospital if it suddenly becomes a real crisis, so I want to stay till early tomorrow to see how it turns out. You think I have time?” and the doctor said, “Never a guarantee. Your mother could be expiring this moment as we speak. You just have to hope she holds out that long. Keep me informed.” He wrote down most of what the doctor said, while he was talking to him, and what he remembered after when he was sitting by his mother the next day. All those notes, several pages of them, are stapled — not stapled; he doesn’t have a stapler. His kids do, one between them, but he didn’t use it. How come he can’t remember the simple name of such a common object, one he’s used thousands of times or at least a thousand, both as a word and an object? It binds pages, holds them together. It’s the first time he’s forgotten it — paper clip, he paper-clipped the pages and put them someplace, probably also in the top night-table drawer with that other thing he was thinking or talking of before and thinks he put in there, and which he also now forgets what it was. Something to do with his mother? He means, did this other thing have something to do with her? Photos? He doesn’t think so. More notes? It’s possible but doesn’t ring a bell. Since when does memory loss have anything to do with grief? Or the other way around: grief cause memory loss? Maybe he’s just tired. But he’s slept more the last few days than he has, in so short a time, in years. And he’s only sleeping this much to avoid remembering things about her. Should he reach over to the drawer — it’d take just a little turn — and get them out, the notes plus that other thing, if he put either of them there? No, he doesn’t think he’ll ever want to read those phone conversation notes. Why would he? So why’d he write them down then, when he was on the phone? It seemed important at the time, as if he were being given instructions on how to take care of her at the end. When he was with his mother: just to do something, he supposes, or more than that, but he forgets. He also doodled; he also tried reading; he also cleaned his nails with his thumbnails and bit off most of the torn cuticles; he also just stared at her for minutes, hoping her heavy breathing would suddenly ease up and that she’d open her eyes, blink, give some recognition that she knew where she was, turn her face or just move her eyes to him — he’d be saying softly, “Mom? Mom?”—and smile and maybe even say something: his name, how is he? where’s her dear friend Ebonita? she’s thirsty and would like something to eat, and so on. He also remembers thinking, What is she thinking? Is there anything going on in her head? Is it more like dreaming? Then what is she dreaming? Is she in any pain? Is her heavy breathing and chest congestion affecting her thoughts? Is there anything he can do to make things better for her? A different position? Raise or lower the top of the hospital bed? Another pillow? One less pillow? Put a cushion under her feet? Should he be talking to her? Should he read to her from a book or even today’s paper so she just hears his voice? Would that bring her out of it? What would help her come out of what more and more seems like a coma? Is she shitting, peeing? She wears paper diapers, but do these have to be changed? He’ll know when she starts smelling. Water? Shouldn’t she have water or some sugar solution so she doesn’t starve? Is she really dying? Can this be it? Will she never recognize him again? Can he really be sitting here the last day or hours of her life and where she’ll never wake up? If she hears his voice — he was told when his father was comatose that the last sense to go is hearing — will that help her see him in whatever pictures are in her head? About those notes, does he think — he also thought a few times while he sat there looking at her: Maybe it’d be best if she went now without pain rather than have to go through this another time and then maybe another time before she dies — but does he think that, let’s say in a year or two or even six months, when he’s going through that top drawer for something else and comes upon the notes, if he put them there — or any place he put them — that he’ll read them or leave them in the drawer without reading them or just throw them away soon as he recognizes them? How can he know that now? But what does he think? He thinks, How can he know now what he’ll do? though he thinks he’ll more than likely throw them away unread. But things she said that he took down — in fact, isn’t that what that “other thing” is? — he’ll keep and read, keep forever, in the drawer or someplace safe, not just what she said on the phone the last time but all the things she’s said the past few years that he’s taken down, and regret if he couldn’t find them and regret more if he thought them lost. After about an hour and a half of sitting near his mother — he got up once to make coffee, another time to get it after it was made and wash the carafe and coffee machine cone — Ebonita, sitting a couple of feet farther away from her than he, pointed out phlegm dribbling over her lip and he thought, I suppose she wants me to wipe it, she obviously isn’t getting up — well, she spent a long night with her, didn’t get much sleep — and he got up and wiped his mother’s mouth and chin with his handkerchief. “Tissues,” Ebonita said. “We have a whole box of them and more boxes in the closet,” pointing to what was the broom closet when he was a kid but which now held all kinds of medical supplies and things, and he said, “Sorry; it’s also not sanitary, using this rag,” and stuck the handkerchief back into his pants pocket, but first, he remembers, folding the wet part up so it wouldn’t soak through to his thigh. Ebonita, he now remembers, had actually said, “Look at what’s coming out of her mouth; we should fix it.” Then more phlegm spilled out and Ebonita stood beside him and kept supplying tissues to wipe with, and he wiped her mouth and inside her lips and with wads of tissue dabbed her tongue and around it to absorb the constant rise of spit, dropping the tissues and the wads one by one into an old ice bucket that was being used as a trash container by the bed. “How come she doesn’t have a real trash can?” he said. “There used to be lots of them in the house. This one fills up so quickly,” and she shrugged and said, “Up till now this one did all right.” Then his mother started coughing while he was wiping her mouth, and he put his arms behind her and raised her up and held her there with one arm, thinking, This’ll help her cough up the mucus better and maybe even help her breathing and where she won’t choke on all that stuff, and it’ll also be easier to get the phlegm out of her mouth. Then, as long as he had her up and she had stopped coughing and bringing up phlegm, he thought about giving her water. “Don’t you think she should have some water? How long has it been?” and Ebonita said, “Hours. I tried to before but none got in. And she hasn’t evacuated for a long time neither, which isn’t good. But it isn’t easy getting liquids down her; she coughs it all up.” “We should have an eyedropper to give it. Even drop by drop would do some good. You don’t have one around, do you? I thought of bringing one — I sort of knew she’d need it — and found some old one at home but left it.” Regrets: he did think of it but never looked for one. His wife had said, “If she’s unconscious or too weak to drink anything, how do you get medicine and fluids into her? Probably she should be in a hospital and on IV,” and he said, “Believe me, they’ll only make matters worse for her there, forcing things down, sticking a million needles in. Maybe I should bring an eyedropper — I know we have one here — or go out now for one of those dropperlike spoon things we used for the kids when they wouldn’t swallow their medicine,” and she said, “We never had to give it that way,” and he said, “Then I’ve seen them displayed in the pharmacy here,” but that’s as far as it went. He could have driven that night to a local Giant that has a pharmacy and big drug department or bought one in a drugstore when he walked to her building from the subway or gone into the drugstore at Penn Station, but forgot. He didn’t forget; he thought of it when he got out of the subway and passed a drugstore but then thought, Just get to her building, you could miss seeing her alive by minutes, and started to jog. When the train was pulling in to New York he thought of calling her from Penn Station, but after he got off he ran through the terminal to the subway station with a token in his hand and ran up the stairs to the platform, not wanting to waste a minute calling, but had to wait several minutes for the uptown train. He looked for a phone on the platform but the only one operating was taken and continued to be taken till the train came. Then the person hung up and got in the same car with him. He set his mother down and said to Ebonita, “Can you get me … no, I’ll get it; watch her,” and got a tablespoon and cup of water from the kitchen, raised her in his arms again, and while Ebonita held the cup he got a spoonful from it and stuck it in his mother’s mouth. It seemed to go down. “Good, Mom, good,” though she didn’t open her eyes or make any response or motion that she knew anything was going on around her or happening to her. He got another spoonful of water and was ready to stick it in her mouth when the other water, or some of it, dribbled out. “Mom, if you’re hearing me,” he said, wiping her chin and neck, “you have to take some water; you need it.” “Maybe you gave her too much, though I didn’t see her neck swallowing any of it. Try half,” and he spooned half a tablespoon of water into her mouth and looked and it seemed to go down. “It’s gone. Did you see her neck moving this time?” and Ebonita said, “I think so, but I can’t say for sure.” Then some white liquid rose from her throat, and he said, “Oh, my God, what the hell’s that?” till her mouth was almost full of it and it was about to spill out, and Ebonita threw her hands to her face and said, “Oh, no, this is the end, I’m sure of it. Delilah”—to her daughter, sitting there looking at his mother—“cover your eyes,” and he said, “What are you talking about? Get me a towel; lay it down here,” while he held his mother up with one arm and stuck a bunch of tissues into her mouth to soak up the liquid and when the towel was down he held her face over it and all the liquid seemed to come out. He held her there a few seconds more and then got her in a sitting position to wipe her face and see if any more liquid was there, and some seemed to be coming up, white again, and he held her face over the towel and said, “Get it all out, Mom, this is good for you; all the junk in your lungs is coming up,” and when no more of it came out he held her in a sitting position and wiped her face and patted her cheeks and head with damp tissues and thought of getting a damp rag to lay across her forehead when she started choking and her eyes were open and he said, “Mom?” and she looked blankly ahead while her body started shaking and she was still choking, and he said, “Mom, what is it? Can you hear me? What can I do for you?” and her eyes never moved and she was still shaking and choking but nothing was coming up, and he yelled, “Mommy, oh, no, Mommy, oh, Mommy!” and held her to him with both arms and put his mouth to her forehead and said, “It’s all right, Mommy, it’s all right, I’m here, Gould’s here, I’m here with you, Mommy, I won’t leave you, oh, no, Mommy, my Mommy, oh, Mommy, oh, please don’t go, Mommy, please, please don’t go,” and Ebonita said, “She’s stopped, she’s quiet, I knew it, close her eyes, close her eyes!” and he held her head up and shut her eyes and let her head down softly till it hung over his shoulder, and he kept her that way for around a minute, his eyes closed and head against her neck, hugging her, and then laid her on her back and put his ear to her chest and mouth and chest again and then rested his head on her chest and started to cry. The cat jumps onto the bed, walks around him on both sides, and then steps up on his chest and lies on it facing him, and he says, “Please get off, you weigh a ton, I can’t breathe with you on me,” and the cat stays and he picks it up and drops it on the floor. It jumps right back up and lies on his chest the same way, and he says, “Listen, I told you, I know you mean well and want to help me, but you’re just too big a load,” and raises his arm to lift it off him again. The cat sits up, resettles itself on his chest till it faces his feet, and stretches out more so there’s much less weight in one place than before, and he says, “Okay, all right,” and rests his hand on its back; “you don’t feel so heavy now, stay.”

The Walk

He’s walking to town — there’s no bread in the house for tonight, he’ll probably get a few other things at the market, doesn’t know what, certainly a coffee for a quarter — and thinks of his daughters, doesn’t know why this thought suddenly popped in — sure he does, because of what happened earlier, Fanny saying when he dropped her off at school, “I love you, Daddy,” and probably also Josephine, last night, lying in bed, lights out, he’d just finished reading her a fairy tale and kissing her good night, saying, “I love you, Daddy,” and he saying, “I love you very much too,” and to Fanny, at school, “I love you very much too, sweetheart.” Tears come. Silly. Why? Okay, then not so silly, but if anyone saw him up close now he’d still feel embarrassed. Walking to the village, the back way through people’s properties and along hilly streets with lots of big trees, to the market to buy bread and also to take a break from work, nice day, fall but early fall, temperature in the mid-sixties, sun out, soft breeze, he’s in shorts, T-shirt, and sandals, wishes he’d worn sneakers. What else they need? Doesn’t know; don’t they always need milk? He’ll get the coffee for sure. Has he missed getting one there five times in the four years he’s been going to this store? and he goes, by car, bike, or foot, about three times a week. They usually have, on a shelf by the deli department, two regular coffees and one decaffeinated in tall Thermoses, but he always gets the most exotic caffeinated. Sometimes they have Kona, and always a pint container of half-and-half in a bowl of ice water next to the Thermoses, but which he’s rarely used, and a few times a hazelnut- or amaretto-flavored nondairy creamer, all for a quarter, which you can put into the coin box on the shelf or pay for with your other items at the checkout counter. Store doesn’t lose money on it; in fact the coffee makes the customer stay longer, he’s sure, and buy more. Maybe a dessert. Ones he bought for the kids yesterday they didn’t touch, he saw this morning, when he opened the bakery bag thinking there were rolls inside he could heat up for them, and they were what, honey-glazed? so by tonight they’ll be a little stale. Thinks of his older daughter. Didn’t come from thinking about the doughnuts, did it? Oh, one thought leads to another and probably helped by the action and solitude of the walk and no distractions, not even a bird squawk or squirrel zipping around nearby. Dropping her off at school today. She got her things together in the car after he stopped with the motor running and gear in PARK (heavy backpack, big sketch pad, and something else: brown lunch bag with the lunch she made) and turned to him — she opened the door first — and said, “I love you, Daddy,” and he said that “very much” line (this is all pretty much ritual) and kissed her cheek (which he also does every day when she leaves the car unless it’s obvious she’s angry at him, though he doesn’t often kiss her hello when he picks her up at school in the afternoon), and she left the car and he smiled at her through the window on the passenger’s side and she smiled back, affectionately, not mechanically (usually she heads straight for school without looking at him again; he doesn’t know why today was different for her), and headed for the steps leading to the school entrance. Still awkward, he noticed: ungainly, he means. Other girls around, obviously older — some had driven cars to school and parked them in the lot — walked with so much more grace and confidence. Well, her age, and that she’s new here, he thought, a freshman, it’s been just a couple of months for her, and she stumbled going up the sidewalk curb, almost tripped but quickly righted herself, dropped the lunch bag when she stumbled (nothing fell out), picked it up, continued a few steps, hesitated, turned back to him, no doubt hoping he wasn’t looking at her. He waved — he immediately knew he shouldn’t have, and was smiling, though she might have been too far away to see that; besides, she wears glasses and she didn’t have them on; she’d told him in the car, when he asked, that they were in her backpack and scowled at him — maybe a smile through a car window’s more difficult to make out than a scowl, even with your glasses on — and went up the steps and into the school. She probably forgot about it a few minutes later, certainly once she got to her homeroom and started talking to one of her friends. No, homeroom was what she had in middle school; here, if she doesn’t get to school early, she goes right to her locker and then to her first class. Did his watching from the car have anything to do with her stumbling? How could it have? Maybe she was aware his car hadn’t driven off — no familiar sound of its motor — and sensed he might still be parked, or just assumed it, and was looking at her from behind, and she became self-conscious because she knew she was somewhat ungainly and didn’t walk as gracefully as a lot of the other girls and that was what made her, or helped make her, stumble. That could be it. He’d love to tell her but probably won’t, better not to bring up things that remind her of recent embarrassments—“Don’t think that way, my darling. Everyone’s like that when they’re young — you’re still growing, in height and your feet and so on. And if you saw me smiling in the car, believe me it was only an adoring smile. When I saw your head turning around I smiled, which is what I almost always do in something like this, because I thought you were going to look at me. It had nothing to do with your stumbling, which anyone could do, by the way. You should see how many times I do it in a year, and sometimes when I’m jogging — this probably happens about once every six months — I trip over an exposed tree root or sidewalk bump or something and fall flat on my hands and knees and cut them … I must have told you that. So I’d never find anything funny in your stumbling. And if you really had tripped, spilled things and landed on your hands, I would have run out of the car to you, though you might not have liked that: drawing too much attention to it. So let’s say I would have wanted to run to you to do what I could to help, certainly picked you up if you were still lying there, and said things like ‘I’m so sorry, my darling, are you all right? It can happen to anybody. I trip all the time and occasionally hurt myself badly, cuts and bruises and such, so I’m as clumsy, if not even more so, as anyone your age, in action as well as trying to put across my ideas and phrasing words, though don’t ask me what the last two have to do with it,’” and he drove home, it only takes seven to ten minutes from her school, and thought then and thinks something like it now, What a lovely girl; and what a lucky guy I am in having such a daughter, so sweet and bright and kind and modest. It’s so painful to think she might be hurt — she will be — in the future, and many times, or at least several, physically, emotionally. But what else they need? Can’t think of anything. Cat food they can always use. Opened the only can of it he could find in the crowded cupboard this morning, so two cans of cat food — don’t want to make the bag too heavy and almost no space at home to store it. And of course the coffee, that he’ll have drunk before he leaves the market or, as he’s sometimes done, standing outside. Then his younger daughter. Last night, while she was sitting up in bed and he came in to say good night, that sad look she had over nothing, it seemed. As if he said something truly horrible to her — he’s said some lousy things but nothing deliberately or even unintentionally horrible: it’d destroy her or at least for the night and maybe a few days, and he’d feel terrible, a lot more than when he’s just said those mean things. What could he say that’d really be horrible? That she’s not pretty. That’d be just mean. But will never be and, to add to it, never was. That she was an ugly baby and hasn’t grown prettier as a child. That she’s dumb, just about as dumb as anyone he knows, and so on. That the short haircut she begged to get and just had makes her look stupid and homely. The mean or lousy things: when he was working at his desk in the bedroom and she ran in and said, “Daddy, I have to ask you something,” and he said, “Damn, don’t you see I’m working?” And once, “Must you always burst in here like that? Dammit, you scared the freaking shit out of me!” And, “Listen, it’s obvious you didn’t study for the test and that’s why you got such a crappy mark, so stop making up excuses.” Other times. But why does she so often have that sad look? Something he’s done or continues to do? Doesn’t think so, and it certainly isn’t anything from his wife. An accumulation of those mean and lousy and insulting remarks that she knows he’s liable to make anytime? He hasn’t made that many to her, and they were spread out enough where they wouldn’t have accumulated like that, though who knows? And whenever he’s said something like that to her — and “insulting” only a few times — he’s always quickly apologized. And if — and she almost always does this — she ran out of the room or away from him to wherever she goes, usually her bedroom, where she slams the door, since it usually happens at home, and started crying, he went after her and apologized there, blaming himself for his short temper and for being high-strung sometimes and jumpy, especially when he has his back to the door and is busy working and someone bursts into the room, and promised to do things for her, like get her something she’s been wanting for a long time and which he didn’t think she needed, till she made up with him and they hugged and he’d kiss the top of her head and close his eyes a few seconds and hope hers were closed for a short time too, though not necessarily when his were, and then be extra solicitous to her the rest of the day and probably the next, or at least till he saw her off at school. And it’s not that she’s a gloomy child. She’s in fact the skipper of the family. He doesn’t mean the boss of it, the way some people use that word for kids and wives. Just that she frequently bounces around, has for years, much more than her sister ever did and is a lot more cheerful than her sister too, singing in the shower, laughing at the comics, things like that, though her sister’s witty and usually smiles and sometimes guffaws when she sleeps. Once bounced exuberantly into the refrigerator and broke a front tooth. Wailed then. He went to her first. Around a year ago, family was at dinner. She usually eats fast and leaves first, even when he and his wife say to stay—“Sit and talk with us, we like your company”—did they say to stay that night? What’s the difference? And she usually gets up a minute or two after one of them tells her to stay — twirled around past them from the living room into the kitchen — he was probably glad she was so happy. His wife and he might even have exchanged smiles when she twirled past, though also concerned she was jumping around too much so soon after eating. She was singing as she spun into the kitchen, lost her footing, and smacked her face into the refrigerator. (The refrigerator can’t be seen from the dining room; she later told him how she hit it.) Then she screamed. He thought she was kidding, he doesn’t know why — maybe the scream didn’t seem like a real one at first and he thought she wanted them to think she was hurt or he just didn’t want to believe she was — but it continued and he yelled, “Josephine, anything wrong?” and she screamed harder and he ran in and blood was dribbling out of her mouth and she wailed, “Oh, no, my tooth, my tooth,” and he told her to open her mouth wide and she kept it closed and he tried forcing it open, he wanted to relieve his worry that one or both of her front teeth were broken — a side or back one, even one of the eye teeth, wasn’t that important — and she said, facing away from him, “No, no, don’t look, my tooth, I felt it, I’m so sorry, so sorry, I’m so sorry, Dada, I didn’t mean to, I’m so stupid, I was so stupid,” and he said, “It’s all right, I won’t blame you, just open your mouth,” and she did, and the bottom half of a permanent front tooth was gone, and he yelled, “Oh, no, oh, my darling!” knowing right away what it meant to her, and hugged her and said, “I’m so sorry, so sorry, oh, what can we do?” and they both cried, and his wife came in and said, “Calm down; what about her tooth?” and he said, “She broke it, a front one,” and his daughter screamed and wrenched free of him and ran into the bathroom and started shrieking and he ran after her and she was looking at her mouth in his shaving mirror and he said, “Don’t look, it’s no good for you; we’ll get it fixed, I promise,” and wiped the blood away, got ice and treated her, and called her dentist, who said to come in tomorrow morning, “But if you can see a dark spot in the core of the cut part then it could mean she’ll lose it,” and soon after that a friend of his wife’s called and just happened to have lost a front tooth the same way when she was a girl but against a stove and said she got the bottom half replaced with a toothlike bond and when her mouth was fully grown a permanent fixture and no one’s ever been able to tell the difference and she can bite into apples and carrots with it and she thinks a quarter of the women she knows have lost part of a front tooth, and he said, “Tell Josephine all that,” and she did and things quickly got better. He looked for the tooth part on the floor, found it, and it seemed to be the whole piece, didn’t want to hold it under the broken tooth it came from to see if it was a perfect fit, so later went into her room and said, “Open your mouth again, sweetheart; I want to see how your tooth’s doing,” and then, “It’s looking a lot better. A clean break, two pieces, very simple, so it’s going to work out fine, no complications,” thought of bringing in the found part to the dentist the next day but then thought, What for? and it’ll just get lost, and taped it to a piece of paper and wrote the date and event on it—J’s broken front tooth, fridge, disturbing scene for both of us—and put it in a small container where he keeps every tooth his daughters have lost except the one Fanny swallowed, all taped to paper with just the date on it except the first two of theirs, which also say what number it was and where it came out. Anyway, last night, that sad look, he asked if anything was wrong, she shook her head and asked why, he said, “Your look,” and she said, “What’s wrong with it?” and he said, “Nothing, it’s fine; one doesn’t always have to be smiling,” and read to her awhile. After he turned off the light and said good night, she said, “I love you, Daddy,” and he said, first kissing her forehead and lips — ritual; if he didn’t she’d ask him to by saying, “A huggy”—“I love you too, veddy mucho grandee, now go to sleep, you’ve school tomorrow,” and she said, “No, we’re off,” and he said, “This is one of my rare sharp nights; you can’t fool me,” and left the room, her door opened a couple of inches, which for the past half year is how she’s asked it to be and he’ll keep leaving it that way till she says not to. Tears again, quickly wipes them. What is it with me today? he thinks, walking downhill to the market. Is it something else? My mother, maybe. When he spoke to her last night she seemed too weak and despondent to speak and after a minute broke off because of her coughing, she said, but hadn’t thought of her today till now. He’ll call her when he gets home, first thing. But what else they need? What did he remember to get so far? Cat food, bread, milk. Gallon of spring water for his wife, but that’d be too heavy to carry. Desserts for the kids; maybe a baklava for Fanny and a napoleon for Josephine — now that’s odd; he never thought of the connection before. They’re twice to three times the price of the doughnuts he usually buys, but hang the expense: they’re always excited when he tells them he got their favorite desserts. That should do it, and the container of coffee, and takes a handful of change from his pants pocket, counts out twenty-five cents, ten of it in pennies — the people who empty the coin box must hate getting the pennies, but he’s got to get rid of them some way — and puts the counted change into a separate pants pocket, so when he takes it out for the coffee he won’t have to count it again. Such a nice day; he’ll drink the coffee sitting on the bench in front of the market and dump the empty container into the trash can by it, or sit there if there aren’t too many bees around. Will this closeness or oversolicitousness or whatever he should call it ultimately hurt his kids? No, they’ll hardly remember it, or only a little. He reaches the market’s parking lot, crosses it and goes inside, picks up a shopping basket, though for all he’s going to buy he could just as well carry the things in his hands, gets the coffee first, feels like having it with half-and-half today, doesn’t know why — maybe so he can drink it faster, though there’s no need for him to rush home, so it could be his stomach telling him something — and sticks the change into the coin box. Now what did he tell himself to get? — sipping the coffee by the deli counter and then finishing it off — bread, milk, two cans of cat food. What else? Forgets.