Florida

THE BIG HOUSE

OLD DEAD HANDS PRAYERED, a draped arrangement of draping skin, a fleshy hem colored to look alive by the gentle mortician, Nonna was in the casket, and I was at her side, yet “the glazing eyes shunned my gaze,” or that was what I was remembering about her as we drove to her interment.

Arthur had driven us — Uncle Billy, Aunt Frances, me — through a gardener’s rain that gullied the tent as we stood at the site, Nonna’s gravesite, brighter greens, June, plate-sized peonies beaten in the downpour, the coffin shiny.

Who can forget? some said. Description of the too long-alive, now dead. The homily for Nonna went on and on, and Arthur had to wait.

Who would have guessed there was so much left to say?

At the Big House everyone I saw chewed with his mouth open. At the Big House Nonna’s lawyer sleeked through the room, nodding at stories, saying, “Yes, she was an amazing woman, yes, indeed.”

Indeed, indeed sounded like my mother when she was being formal, but my mother was not here. Mother was in California, the state she called her home. “I can be a kook and not stand out,” she often repeated when we spoke on the phone.

Uncle Billy had not spoken to Mother in a while, and he excused himself for keeping my mother uninformed, saying, “Your mother would be too upset,”

By the time I told her, Mother said it was too late for her.

“I need weeks to get ready,” Mother said, “and besides Nonna’s been dead for years.”

Aunt Frances said, “Your mother’s not interested in other people anyway,” which wasn’t true, I thought; because Mother wanted to know about Aunt Frances, yes, and Uncle Billy. Mother wanted to know about them especially and asked me, she asked me often now that we spoke any day of the week and not just Sundays — Mother asked me, “How are your aunt and uncle spending their money these days?”

But how would I know? I didn’t live here anymore; I recognized very few faces. Mrs. Greene’s, Mrs. Greene’s daughter, Arthur, of course, the Nordstruckers, Miss Pearl of Miss Pearl’s (still alive!), the Miller sisters, Mr. and Mrs. Vanvogel. Uncle Billy and Aunt Frances moved among these and other friends they said were Nonna’s but who were, in fact, theirs, as who was left alive that Nonna knew?

Death, a death mound, like those lumps in the earth Aunt Frances had pointed to as burial grounds for the Indians. Of course, Indians, Uncle Billy’s found and collected arrowheads from the Potawatomi! Next to the case of sprung-winged bugs and other artifacts. Buckskinned men powwowing lake paths in soft-soled moccasins, they and their squaws and their sick-to-death children were turned into lumps in the earth where Aunt Frances had pointed. Nonna and Nonna’s friends — even the absent O’Boyle — and Arlette and my father were turned into hillocks I drove past, touring the countryside because I couldn’t stay at Uncle Billy’s house watching the people eat with their mouths wide open — no. I didn’t want to talk to Nonna’s lawyer, so I took the second car and drove to where I could sit off the road and smoke.

I smoked and thought of Nonna and how she had outlived my dread of her dying.

I smoked and wondered at how green it was, June, green and cold, a bed of iced lettuce, and in the distance down the hill, the lapis-blue of lakes, one after another, as though the land were a lake and the lakes, blue stone, and skipped. How was it possible to be cheerful, and yet I was; I was oddly gleeful and merrily giant-stepping into my life.

Nonna left me money — thank you, Nonna! — and a large diamond ring and a double strand of pearls. I bought an apartment in a brownstone with most of what she gave me. West Seventy-Six, in the city where sunlight is expensive.

NONNA SPEAKS

HOW DID I KNOW except that I knew and had always known what Nonna would say. How Alice came early and fast — rudely. The way she was. July 10, 1928, a scorcher. “Tubs of dry ice ringed my bed, and the smoke was impossible to see through. I could feel people around me, but I couldn’t see them. Midwife and helper, and someone at my ear, fanning, but no one else. Although I didn’t really look, I didn’t open my eyes, I didn’t want to see who was in attendance. Feeling was enough. I hadn’t wanted another child; and if I had to, not a daughter. I don’t like women, and they were all around me when Alice was born, ahead of time, loudly. The way she was. Forward and boisterous from the beginning. Even as a little girl, she had precocious ideas about beauty. Once Alice cut off the heads of my peonies and floated the blossoms in saucers. Saucers, and more saucers, everywhere. The house felt like a pond I was swimming through. Her father said then, and for years after, that Alice was simply artistic. Well, maybe she was, but the way she used the downstairs phone closet as a sketch pad was no amusement to me. Drawings of high-heeled feet, a bit of shoulder and neck, a woman’s face on the baseboard corners isn’t my idea of funny. I am from the old school. Stiff, phony — I heard her clichés, the repellent voice she used to say, my mother. But the stories she started about her father’s affairs were the most hurtful. The redhead on the train, the woman Alice said was really her mother, and the story that she had been adopted and brought to the house and wasn’t mine. Hah! She should have a taste of a midwife’s stitchery! The coarse repair of what that girl tore. Alice is a cruel and hurrying person; the miseries that befell her she brought on herself. She was only eighteen when she met your father. He was years older with a college degree and experience of war. His father was dead. He was a sad sack even then. How old was he — thirty? But your mother insisted. ‘What’s your rush?’ we asked. Alice! She should have known better than to drive with a man who couldn’t drive; but even after the second accident, after he had broken her face in a dozen places, she let him take the wheel. It was his fault she lost her good looks. We all said, leave him. Poor boy. Moping around the house on a weekend without even the energy to dress. And what was there to be sad about? The man didn’t have to work, mind you. He could go on sputtering poetry. Alice had money. Her father had made sure of that, but Alice should have married someone like her daddy. Her problem was she wanted. Alice wanted, wanted, wanted, on and on. She was expensive. She was spoiled. Her father had made sure of that. Alice thought if she filled a husband’s closets with expensive suits he would wear them and make her a fortune. I told her she was a fool, but she wanted a family right away. She said not in a million years would I ever understand. Alice was mean — her father was mean — and she deserved what she got. I can’t say I was sorry, but her husband was unhappy; he needed help; he shouldn’t have been left home to drink

“I am lucky Alice’s father didn’t drink. That’s all I’ll say.

“No, don’t even bother to ask.

“All I’ll say is Alice’s father didn’t spend my money and he left me with some. With a lot. He provided, but I was frugal. People used to money don’t tend to spend it. I didn’t, and yet my undergarments have always been silk, and most of what I wear comes from Paris. I like pretty clothes, so there’s a reason Alice likes clothes although her choices are garish, fantastic, often in very bad taste. The drugs and the drinking have never helped. At least that’s what I think. I don’t know for sure. I have never much indulged. I like punch cocktails and after-dinner drinks, the kinds made with sugar and cream. Alice puts out that I like pills myself, but Alice doesn’t know what she is saying. She exaggerates. She likes to tell stories. She tells coarse stories. She says what my husband liked about me were my breasts. She could write about the daisies but she chooses to write about shit. That’s what I always say is why write about … when you could write about the daisies. Alice thinks I’m in bad health, but I am not. I am healthy. I live alone in a large house with a housekeeper and a caretaker, extra gardening help and cleaning and sometimes with my granddaughter — with you, dear heart.

“I have never had to worry about money. I did not fight with my husband. When I was angry at him, I bought myself some jewelry. No, I am not leaving your mother my diamond. I am leaving your mother snarled in trusts she will never unknot. She expects to get my pearls, but she is in for a surprise, and maybe I’ll just give the ring to you. I might just leave you the sparkler.

“Here’s the key to where I keep it. Open that drawer and see.”

FATHER

I FOUND HIM, I think, my own. Late summer in a far-afield family site, I stood at his grave and tried to communicate. A radio played from somewhere loudly, and I couldn’t think what I was to him or would have wanted to be with this racket going on. Tunes from the 1960s, for Christ’s sake, and coy impatiens growing so easily around his stone, I couldn’t think who he was to me — but some kind of father, surely.

MOTHER

MOTHER, OR THE WOMAN who said she was my mother, settled in California, finally. That was where she finally went alone and where I found her. She bought a home, which she insisted was a first home because, unlike all of the others, she had picked it: a modern twist done in taupes and railings, built-ins, islands, skylights unexpected. More sun and more sun! On the days when she was well, she cut gardenias and floated them in silver ashtrays; she opened the terrace doors. The ocean brought a breeze; although she was halfway up the canyon, some few blocks from the beach, the sheer curtains caught the wind and looked like surf. I saw such days as these with her in the summers I went to visit — high-pressure high-colored days — Mother’s cats flopped dog-wise on the driveway in the sun. “Don’t drive over them!” this new and cautionary mother was calling from her bed.

I was driving now; Nonna was dead, and I was doing the leaving.

“But you only just got here! Don’t leave. Who is there to watch TV with me? Can’t you stay another week?” Mother said, “I don’t understand how you can leave in this weather.” She asked, “How can you?”

I told her it was hard, but it wasn’t really hard to leave her, not at all. I had fingered the dust of split capsules and licked the insides of drawers. Waxes, razors, jellies, whatever I had found that could be used on the body, I had used it, powdering the mound between my legs and walking through the modern house fearlessly undressed and shaved. The air against the newly shaved part was a pinprick thrill.

I was interested in meeting new men, but Mother’s friends were mostly women. The men who fixed her car, the gardener, these men she knew only in passing. California was women and cats and time spent on the flat, flesh-colored beach beneath the rusty cliffs near La Jolla.

Poor Mother in her mother’s body. I thought about it and about my own body. I shaved obsessively. Summer to summer, my goal was to be hairless and smooth and all one color — tawny.

We often went to the beach.

We went to Sea World a million times.

“Vons,” Mother said. “We need something for dinner.” I criticized her for the way she lived.

Mother said, “I’m sorry I don’t know any men for you,” and she offered me her sticky wand, swearing, “It works, believe me. Try.”

“No.”

I knew the sound the wand made. I had heard my mother’s voice swoop, and the consequences! Animals snarled in their clothesline-tethers or retching what was spiked for them to feed on, I had heard the calamitous tread of pets; I had heard the sounds of women singing off-key. Fires in the fireplace crackling in August, stalled cars, spills, glass, glass stepped on, accidents, emergencies, the wail once of an ambulance — for Mother? I think it was for Mother, but all of this happened when I was half asleep. Maybe I was dreaming; I didn’t ask about it,

I said, “We’re doing all right without men.”

She said, “But we could use more money!”

“We were laughing then, Mother and I; we were loud with what bodily pleasure there was to be had in it, in making noise, in breaking one object over another, in saying, fuck, fuck, fuck, why did we let them do it?

“But with Nonna,” I started to speak.

“With Nonna you could have whatever you wanted.”

“A respectable life,” I said.

“Arlette there to make your bed for you. For money and the comforts money buys you lived with your grandmother, and now look at what we missed.”

There were times I would have missed. The night she threw herself over the hood of his car — who was it? — to keep him from leaving. I reminded her. I knew enough to make her cry.

And she knew enough to make me cry, but she didn’t, and she never mentioned Walter, my own, unmet. She never reminded me of all he broke. She could guess at what I remembered; Mother had had a terrible Walter, too.

“I really don’t like to fly” was what Mother said as if I had asked, “Will you visit?” She said, “It didn’t have to be this way.” She said, “My mother. My mother, my mother, my mother was behind it,” and then she cried, and I was satisfied but embarrassed and went to get us new drinks. No one visited; my mother mostly slept. “What time is it?” she asked every time she waked.

Nearly one in the afternoon, nearly two.

“I was thinking,” she would start.

“What?” I asked. “Thinking what?”

“Of, of, of.”

Oh, I was tired of finishing Mother’s sentences.

It was time to go home now.

But I came back another summer to California and stayed until the books I had brought and intended to read stuck to what they were pressed to, and the stationery curled, and the stamps dampened, and the addresses in my book looked to have been written long ago by a much more serious, constricted person. The person I was here in California was always touching herself with dreamy half purpose, touching herself absently in front of other people — once, the man come to wash the carpet, in sight of him, I fretted and held my hand over, and I walked too soon on the carpet and left behind prints.

And shoes? I rarely wore them in the California summers at my mother’s house, one of a complex, where she lived, a condominium complex beehived in the canyon. Neighbors only glimpsed; the condo staff sucking up leaves or vacuuming the pools, otherwise a terrifying quiet here. Only visiting children and small nippy dogs walked on glittery leashes by women who did not speak English.

“Hola!” Mother called to Bertita and gestured. She pointed to the sheets, the cabinets, the paper products. “Mas?” Mother asked, her nails ticking shelves nearly empty except for cat food. At least the house was well supplied with cat food.

But lonely women and shedding cats turned joke-depressing, and it was time to go home.

“Already?” Mother asked.

“Sadly, yes,” I said, excited.

Home then to the city I went and not to the site of our losses, not to where my father and Nonna were buried, but to a brownstone block, landmarked and ginkgoed, old trees — very pretty. Old trees, old city. New York, New York. Teaching was what I did for money. “I want to be a poet,” was what I confided to no one.

“School starts in two weeks, Mother. I really have to go.”

The woman in California who said she was my mother had how many cats? They were not run over; the coyotes in the canyon ate them, or that was what she said when I came back the next summer and found new kitties. Found new friends, too, while the friends from before were less friendly. Their greetings sounded more like a question. “Alice?” they said, as if, like me, they weren’t sure of Mother’s identity. From summer to summer this mother changed. Her shoulders narrowed, and the weight in her arms dropped. She was growing crooked and used to her bed. It was hard for her to walk. Her hips were replaced; and then, the next summer, the doctors were at her spine.

The doctors took out and put in.

She talked of bolts and special metals and her hip socket growing cold. She said, “When I drink, I don’t feel it — the awful pain.” She asked, “Do I clank?” She asked, “Am I okay?”

“Better,” I said.

“Let me see,” she said. “Did you ever hear of blend?”

My thumb on her lids, I tried to blend; but I could not make her what she was, and what we both thought she had been a long time ago — beautiful, beautiful.

This woman, who said she was my mother, was not beautiful.

This woman said, “I give up,” and then she drank. She liked grape drink and vodka mixed. She liked such food as made her retch and in this way was similar to the mother from before, the same who had said, “Think I care?” then used a razor on her wrist — too lightly but to bloody effect.

“Didn’t they teach you this in college?” she asked, steadying herself against the bathroom sink, wiping at her mouth. “A friend of mine told me that in college anorexics rot the plumbing.” She looked hard at me then. “All that acid,” she said.

“I should go home now,” I said.

“Why?” she asked. “We’re just having fun,” and she smoothed a part of the bed for me to lie on. She said, “Come here, I’ll scratch your back.”

The skin on my back was not yet loosening, and it was easy to be naked before her and lulled by her distracted scratching. We were watching TV, and the TV picture was growing larger, the set giving off heat. Even the show we watched, it seemed, was louder. But outside was quiet and closing in. The sky had clouded up; the sun surely had set, though we could not see the ocean. Soon it would be dark. Her touch grew repetitive and faint when the only light in the room was the fluttering light on TV.

“Shush, no talking.”

“Was I talking?” she asked and fell back to sleep.

Like me, she had to sleep near a glass of water.

Also, I noticed, our feet were alike — cracked heels and bunched toes. Nothing anyone would want to be in bed with, and a sign, I thought, those overlooked feet, that no one had kept company for a long time.

Mother fell into a sleep from which she yet kept speaking.

“What do you want?” I asked. She didn’t answer clearly but played with her lips.

“I should go home now,” I said.

At home, and witness to a clearer change of season, I saw my hair grow in — largely, darkly. Outside the foliage tendrilled, and the bees frenzied the playgrounds’ sweet refuse — apple cores and squeezed cartons of juice. The market stands were full of polished gourds and knotted ears of garnet corn. The ginkgos yellowed; the backyard gardens browned — blow-weed and thistle, late summer’s drift, and the swimsuits I had worn on the California beaches were packed away now, salt-dried. I was growing in. I was making lists and using the phone. I was letting people know I was home again and that the area rug, summer-stored and cleaned, could be delivered, the boxed blankets, newly banded, would soon be needed; I was home again and preparing for the record colds, for the short unlit days and suspending snows, for the frayed, iced wires, the shut-downs, the winds, the space heaters, the fires, the tireless coverage of the ravaging winter that is winter in the city.

The urge to loll in a warm place is the same wherever I go.

WEST SEVENTY-SIX

THE PALPABLE IMPERMANENCE OF the warm weather place we paid to get to — and never won in a raffle — Barbados, the Caribbean, all salt-white, wet, and chafing sand. It caught in the legs of my suit and burned. The terrible Walter, my own (more terrible than Mother’s), bobbed, ridiculous as cork, in the foamy surf; he floated on his back as he might have sat at home. His white feet stuck out, and he wore his silly hat. Surly, threatening man, Walter was yet intent on being happy; but with his mouth open, he gagged on the water that washed over his head, and he draggled himself to shore. Blear, sore face, water rivering off his arms and legs — he was a disappointed traveler ready to go home.

“But we just got here,” I said, and we were fighting at the floating bar, swimming awkwardly around, treading water.

He wanted a real drink — no fruit in it.

He wanted a steak. “Fuck this fufu shit,” he said. “Everything here is skewered on a stick.”

Then I was down the beach away from him and scoring dope.

He said, “You stupid bitch.”

He said, “I hope you get sick.”

Our bedroom was sealed, drawn against the flickering sea.

Cold floor and filmy curtains, stony bed — I couldn’t fall asleep here and smoked my way to somewhere else.

All the time the terrible Walter was counting his money. He was figuring the tips.

He was sipping whiskey in the sealed room after dinner, near the window, in the dark; and because the room was very cold, I left him alone and opened the bathroom windows to let in the warm, wet air. I took a hot shower, which calmed me — but not for long. The sealed room where we slept was very cold and dark, and Walter was in the corner, without his shorts on, drinking, and his body, I saw, was wildly hairy. He saw me looking at him, and he said, “I hate you, too.”

All of the nights on that island, he sat in the bedroom and drank, and I sat in the bathroom and smoked, and we yelled out at each other horrible names. We cried.

I said someone else’s name over and over, and he said someone else’s name, too.

I said, “I want to go home,” and he said, he did, too.

“But where the fuck is my home?” he asked. “Why the fuck did I move in with you?” he yelled, yet he would not leave the brownstone once we were home again and living through the city’s spring arrived while we were gone.

A second spring passed before he died, the terrible Walter, still in the phonebook, at my address.

WEST SEVENTY-SIX

THAT DOG! HE USED to eat his own poo, and you’d kiss him! Remembering an Arlette story made me rueful when in the next room Walter retched whatever was left besides what he had been drinking. Walter’s lips were sausage-mottled, fat grubs I had long ago ceased to kiss, but why had I kissed him to start with?

I had been late, over an hour late, to where we met at a restaurant called Billy’s — loud, close, dark, full of manly hands handling money. He ordered for us old-fashioned, expensive food which he paid for with an aggressive signature. I thought his illegible hand meant he was powerful. Also, importantly, he was older by almost twenty years. Hailing me a separate cab, he said, “I don’t wait longer than ten minutes for anyone, but I did for you tonight. I will never wait for you again.”

No man had reprimanded me in years, but this sweet-sour scolding I remembered — Mother’s Walter, especially — and the charged feeling was the same, so I said yes when he called again, and I was not late.

The terrible Walter wanted children. Insisting on what we had and what we could have together, he said, “I’m not so old we couldn’t try. We could have children.”

“Why not?” I said. I wanted company, but by the time Walter moved into the brownstone not a week in some warm place or chops at Billy’s Friday nights could make us happy. We argued and drank; we wept for being lonely; children were out of the question; children would never have helped.

The terrible Walter introduced me to a man named Carter who was married to a Mitten on the board of a best school. After the evening with Carter and Mitten, the terrible Walter asked me, “Now do you think you’re important?”

Not since my mother had anyone hurt me with my own hurtful thoughts, and I felt sobered.

Walter was homely and heavy and old; he was coarse and lurid and prurient.

We did not like each other and yet perversely made plans for Barbados while he bossed me around and I lumped it being sullen. I liked and I didn’t like being told what to do; I thought, Walter knew how the city worked, and then I thought, he didn’t; but he knew about fucking hard, and he was crude and risky. He took me to unlikely corners where girls could be bought, but I didn’t, I couldn’t, would never although girls are my favorites. I thought, I deserve a Walter, and he must have thought he deserved me, or else why did we stay together, a year, another year until he died? Fucking was why. Fucking was respite from meanness.

WEST SEVENTY-SIX

WALTER LAY ON MY bed loudly servicing himself, saying afterward, “You owe me.” He said, “Pay me. You’ve got some money. I’ll gladly leave,” so I signed to pay what he thought he was due on condition he leave, and then, of course, he died. On an ordinary day — Percodan and Scotch — Walter took up his worn, overstuffed folders and drove off in a taxi to the firm. His bridge-playing, genius friend, a man tilling millions, saw him take the stairs, but no one else he knew encountered him. They think Walter cabbed it downtown and up again without changing cars, but what happened after he came back to the brownstone? The depression on the far side of the bed was evidence he lay there on our sodden sheets listening to the radio. (The radio was still on when I came home.) There was evidence he drank, he took pills, he got sick. He phoned an ambulance.

Someone got the money he surely must have left.

Someone got the money I paid to his estate. … “Sign nothing with fine print,” a daddy could have warned me, but I had signed Walter’s document; I had said yes, I would pay him to move out, and then he did — forever. Only the document held up.

MR. EARLY

AT LEAST I WAS working. I was teaching at the same small school, a small job, yes, teaching, but work not without its pleasures — yesterday’s student writing, “Why can’t Jane see the good things the bad things have?” The steamy urgency of her hand, the felt-tip blots — I had to smile. The loud way she came to Mr. Rochester’s defense, the caped, brooding Rochester, a man as ugly as my own Mr. Early, Rochester, who, in disguise, tested Jane and found her worthy; every year some girl fell in love; this year it was Anna. “I’d marry him!!!!!!!!” Anna wrote. “Who cares about his crazy wife?”

Mr. Early’s wife was soft-spoken, estranged, and not crazy, merely sad was how Mr. Early had once described her. Now she was on the telephone, speaking quietly.

Mr. Early died in the droughted summer when I was twenty-seven, a number I remember because I remember the summer of that year when the exhausted, yellow trees browned in August and lost their leaves overnight, that was the year when bookstores (the close, piled, classroom kind and the silencing kind — often paneled — any kind really) really made me sick. Bookstore fear overtook me the year Mr. Early and Walter died. I was twenty-seven; I saw death behind every sentence: “… a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip.” Summer session classes. I was teaching one and so was Mr. Early. Miles and miles apart, we were teaching last classes when he died. Mr. Early died in a classroom — his heart gave out in a dashed, absurd coincidence: “I heard a fly buzz when I died. …” Mr. Early was reading this poem to his class when he collapsed at his desk and died a death so appropriate, a person might think he had staged it except that Mr. Early wanted to live. He had said so in letters; the last arrived only a week before he died. Long, typed, smally folded in a small envelope, his last letter came with poems he had written and signed. Odd signature he had. Half print and leaned backward, it was at odds, I thought, with his generous voice. He said a lot of his sentences started with the words, How could I … so that why should I be surprised by mine?

How could I have … followed by the banal list of things to be ashamed of.

I was young when I met Walter. I was still young though I forgot. And Mr. Early, he was not so very old when he died. Funny man, he had only grayed. That was at Nonna’s funeral, last time I saw him. Mr. Early had said, “We should have coffee. We should talk.” We stood looking at each other, standing in the slivery, leftover rain, nodding through condolences. Mr. Early said, “We should talk, Alice,” and I said, “Yes, I’ll call,” and then, of course, I didn’t.

How could I …?

I drove around the countryside, saying good-bye to it all. Aunt Frances and Uncle Billy had retreated to the desert; they rarely called. I don’t know why I didn’t.

How could I …?

“Okay,” slowed-down, drawn-out, second syllable stressed O-kays from Mr. Early to stupid answers. I made a lot of them, but I was enthusiastic in my responses, excited by patterns and symbols and irony. I tried never to miss class though I had headaches that took me out of math.

One time Mr. Early looked in on me at the nurse’s office, surely a father’s gesture. “So, so Alice. …” Is this the most of his voice I can remember? I have to strain to hear him speak. “Let’s talk poems!” Let’s talk stories and novels. Why can’t I remember more? He loved sound, the way a sentence sounded. Mr. Early did not hang his hat on plot.

His wife was a painter.

“This is Ellen Early,” she said. Ellen Early, the loved wife with an unlovely voice, saying “I know how you felt about Ed.” But did she, I wondered — did I?

He called me the worst speller. I don’t remember what I said, but afterward I looked up every word I was unsure of. Exaggerated—I misspelled it how many times? I had to come up with ways of remembering. I wanted to be taken seriously although mostly I think I was cute.

Once out-of-doors, Mr. Early surprised me, and his expression, when I turned, was so suddenly and purely affectionate that whatever I had done to provoke it, I wanted to do it again. For Mr. Early loved me, yes, I saw this. Later he wrote me as much.

Mrs. Early, on the telephone, was saying, “… if it had to be anywhere …”

Were my letters to him as full of love?

His letters at the end had narrow margins; he had so much to say. I could hear his mouth juice-up as he talked. He was happy. He wasn’t drinking anymore; he had given up his pipe; he had more breath. “I never really noticed dogs,” in his postscript, “and now I see who they are, and I love them.”

MOTHER

A LOT OF WHAT I said was mean and full of blame and said to make my mother cry, but then, when she did cry, I was embarrassed (this happened often), and I went to the kitchen to get us new drinks.

She called out, “Come light up one of your funny cigarettes and blow it in my face.”

After a while we were laughing. “We were laughing out of all proportion to the joke of Uncle Billy as a young man in the desert, scuffed saddle shoes and khaki shorts and the kind of hat explorers wear in jungle movies. Uncle Billy! Wild Billy! Those skinny legs! Those prominent knees! We laughed.

We laughed, but Mother cried again when I told her Uncle Billy was no longer prospecting but swatting at shrubbery with his cane. I had seen him; I knew. Mother cried, and I felt sad, too.

How young Uncle Billy was when he acted as a father to me, this explorer in the photograph with so much boy left in his face. His stories! In one the prospector was packed on his donkey and sent headless into town. On the cardboard pinned to his pocket was the warning Don’t Come Back. I believed Uncle Billy. I believed then that there was gold in the mountains, and the young man in the photograph, my Uncle Billy, would find it.

Uncle Billy was lucky this way. His pockets were always filled with big change. He bet and bought tickets; he took me to the horse races. I fainted in the stands and lost my money. Uncle Billy doubled his. “A lesson,” he said. “A lesson there for you.”

Good, of course, to have inherited money, but every man wants to make his own.

And Uncle Billy married money, too, which was another lesson, surely. Mother told me about it often enough. She recalled Aunt Frances’s train, the size of her trousseau. “Linens!” Even Nonna was impressed. Inlaid furniture and monumental jewels. Mother cried to remember a tablesetting: Christofle silver, Baccarat crystal, Herend’s Queens Bird five-piece plate setting. “I know the names.” Antique candlesticks, silver pheasants.

“Then why did she steal my clothes?” Mother wanted to know.

“You left them behind; she didn’t think you would mind. She gave them to the high school drama club.”

Mother said, “If I could only smoke one of your funny cigarettes, but I’m dying here as it is.”

She said, “You could have lived with me after I left the San.”

I reminded her of a visit to Aunt Frances’s when Mother came in loudly, unannounced, and tore off the wig she was wearing and exposed her small head. Her own hair was scant, a scraped-back color, a slightness like the rest of those parts she covered up, painted on, glued over. (My father’s fault! His terrible driving!) Mother was crying then, saying, “What’s this crap I can’t take care of my daughter?” In the end, I was glad she lost out to Uncle Billy and Aunt Frances; in the end, I was glad to live away from her. I did not want to be different. And I liked some parts of school. I liked Mr. Early.

“Oh,” Mother said, “that pail full of worms.”

You never met him.”

“Your nonna said.”

“But Nonna wasn’t talking!”

Nonna again. It often came back to Nonna. “If my mother were really dead,” Mother said, “I would know it.”

Mother, sitting on the toilet lid putting on sock-slippers, was talking about what she most often talked about, saying, “It’s Nonna. I know the voice. She’s telling me that I wasn’t Daddy’s favorite. She’s telling me what I already know, but Nonna is still jealous of me no matter what she says.”

Mother said, “It must have been hurtful to Billy that you got the pearls. And the diamond ring was supposed to be mine.”

Mother, wobbling at the sink and flossing, spoke brokenly about Florida and what it would have meant if we had found a way to get there. “Your father and I would still be married!” Mother said. “If it weren’t for them.” My family, my family, the viscous slick of Mother’s family gunking up the day, following her, asking, why can’t your husband, why can’t you? Mother said, “In my family — colds, flu, measles — that’s all. No one ever got sick. Unstable was the word the family used to describe him. Poor Jack! They said to my mother: you need, he can’t, why don’t you.

Mother, using her teeth to open the aspirin, drinking water from the toothbrush glass, swallowing — close, fleshy, human — said, “I didn’t want to be different either. I just was.”

Mother said, “I was in the Garden Club for a while.”

Mother, in bed, said, “Look at me! I’m under the covers before the birdies have said goodnight.”

And so she was! But who cared? We were under the covers together in the warm dark when she talked to me about sunning herself in that aluminum coffin, the sunbed, called Florida. “I named it,” Mother said. She was the one who used it to sleep in endless off-seasons. She was out-of-doors at noon, high sun — had to be — or she would never get any color. She sunned her face and stayed in snow clothes.

“Outside it was rimy,” Mother said, “but I liked saying at parties ‘I’m just back from Florida,’ and their not knowing the tan was local.”

Whatever became of Arthur’s homemade Florida?

“There is so much about your own life you never know,” Mother said, and she sighed, and she cleared her throat and shuffed the pillows, squirming into sleep-position. Then when she was comfortable and quiet in this way, I knew how to lie against her, close enough to be touched.

“Scratch?” I asked, holding out my arm, and I felt her fingers graze me, and then she fell asleep.

A car exploding woke her. “What is going on?” She spoke fearfully, “It’s so noisy. What are you watching? Why are you watching that noise?” She said, “I’m hungry, Alice, aren’t you?” but the food I found made her sick. Mother said, “Don’t blame me, please.” She said, “I can’t help it. I have ulcers. I shouldn’t drink.”

The next day we read our books in separate rooms. This was nice. The sad part was walking out of the dark and into the coarse kitchen light. Mother was at the table in her nightgown, petting herself — her hands, her arms. She said, “There’s nothing to eat. What do you want to do?”

I wanted to wake up very early in the morning and get a head start. I wanted it to be next week and me in the city at home where I lived: West Seventy-Sixth Street! New York, New York.