Florida

ARTHUR

PLOT ABANDONED IN FAVOR of insight … I was reading old notes on the Lyrical Ballads when Aunt Frances called to say Arthur had died while driving a burned woman to the hospital. The greenhouse man, name of Niles, on Lawn: It was his wife. Aunt Frances said, “The fire happened this morning, a kitchen fire.” The wife’s hands were burned. All Aunt Frances knew was already hours ago: Arthur had died on the side of the road in the truck, had died doing what he had done for most of his life: driving a woman, hurt, to help. The burned wife said Arthur had pulled onto the shoulder when he felt it coming. He looked alarmed, yet it seemed he drove onto the shoulder carefully and put the car in park before he settled back and died.

Aunt Frances said, “Can’t you imagine him? It happened on Highway 83 toward Nashotah.”

I knew the highway. I could see the high, graveled shoulder of the road that ran along with the railroad tracks. I saw a strip of grass, some fringe of dusted green, railroad tracks again, and in the distance, cornfields, turned ground dried but planted. I saw myself explaining to the students what Wordsworth meant by “spots of time.”

The new man, Duane, was waiting at the airport. He told me about the accident, and how the burned woman had watched Arthur die. Duane said, “It happened quick.”

Arthur — thinking of others.

Duane drove me on in silence past closer cornfields and lumbering barns and modest houses; we bypassed the town where I had lived with my mother, passed the road to Nonna’s house on the way to Uncle Billy’s with its garden of jutted stone menacing the path to the lake.

“Arthur would have wanted you here,” Aunt Frances said at the door. “I’m glad you could come.”

“Mother wasn’t up to the trip.”

“But your being here he would have wanted,” Aunt Frances said. “He would be glad.”

“I don’t want to see him.” This was later. We were having early supper by then, Uncle Billy, Aunt Frances, and I, and the cold-spring, brusque light made me squint; I spoke to my plate. I didn’t like open-casket, and I didn’t want to see Arthur’s face rouged and his hair painted black.

“There will be a receiving line,” Aunt Frances said, “but we’ll be the only ones in it. You can stand at the head, you won’t see.”

“There was no family,” Uncle Billy said. “We were the only ones. He left instructions.”

Thinking of others, thinking of others — Arthur always.

That night I wanted to dream but I didn’t; no promises or portents, no visions of the years to come, just pure, dark, dreamless sleep, then in the morning, Uncle Billy, at the breakfast table, talking family plots. His was on the north slope of the cemetery, where his father had gone, and he would go, too, and Aunt Frances was debating. But what about Arthur? Arthur was only one and obliged to sleep in a crowded row where nobody knew him.

“Why not with the family?” I asked, and then to Uncle Billy, “You’re such an ass.”

“Alice!” Aunt Frances said. “You’re not the only one upset. Arthur was a part of our family. Your Uncle Billy and I have made all of the arrangements. And none of this ugly business is inexpensive.”

Aunt Frances and her S&H stamps. Yes, I remembered her slimy economies, her slapping after dust.

“We’ve more or less taken care of Arthur these last few years, and we were glad to and lucky we were in a position to do it.” North facing at the table, in less light, Aunt Frances sat to her breakfast, saying, “But what would you know, Alice; you don’t live here.”

For the funeral Aunt Frances wore a nubbly suit and on the jacket some jewel the size of a rodent. A rabid, clawed thing was crawling up her shoulder and the heavy folds of her neck to the harsh hair, dyed rust and shapelessly arranged — some nest!

When did my aunt grow homely?

When did she start to drive?

I followed her driving the second car, so that I wouldn’t have to stay long at the funeral home but could go back to Uncle Billy’s and read. That is if I could find my way back to Uncle Billy’s. Aunt Frances was going too fast, was speeding through four-way stops and leaving me behind with more cars insinuating themselves, and I didn’t know where we were going exactly, making a left and then a right in a neighboring town I had never known well and to a business I had never noticed. LEONARD CRADLE’S FUNERAL HOME was a sign I could not recall although it stood out like a marquee as we drove to it. She forced me to drive over the railroad tracks when the crossing gate was clanging down. She forced me to gun through yellow lights and to pass other cars when the double line said not to. Leonard Cradle’s Funeral Home, Leonard Cradles Funeral Home, Leonard Cradle’s Funeral Home was blinking closer.

I shouted at her for real in the parking lot until Aunt Frances slapped me, and I slapped at her rodent.

“Is this how you show your respect?”

“Fuck off.”

“Is it, Alice?”

“Is it?” from Uncle Billy, leaning on a cane, I noticed, from Nonna’s collection — since when had he taken those? “This may be how people act where you live. …”

I followed them inside and saw faintly familiar town faces. Two women, one from the Piggly Wiggly where Arthur liked to shop and the other from Bold Motors, named Barbara.

Barbara said to me, “I know where you live,” and she smiled a crooked, idiotic smile. “I can’t imagine it,” she said. “Will you ever come home again?”

“Home?” I asked back, and I hoped Aunt Frances heard me.

Who came through the line then? Duane and the unkempt men from Pat’s Hardware, Mr. Philco, the bakery ladies, Rita from the dentist’s, Victor’s Drugstore, and others: They all said, how sorry, how sudden, how sad.

It must be sad for you to come home this way. When was the last time you saw him?

The last time?

I tried to remember while driving back to Uncle Billy’s, but the back roads rolled up and down — a field, a copse, a field, a muddy trough with guernseys ankle-deep in muck, filthy — and nothing came back to me.

I wondered in what colored suit they had dressed Arthur, and why I thought it was turquoise when turquoise didn’t make any sense except as a tuxedo to a prom. Was the coffin’s interior turquoise? Should I have looked?

I put the car in the garage and looked instead at what Arthur had touched here where he had lived and worked. Here was an orderly garage glossed in a color called serviceman’s gray that when beaded in water shined. Fivey Farms, hardly a farm, Uncle Billy’s house. Labels taped on everything he owned in Arthur’s unassuming hand — meek loops, short stems, no flourishes. His labels on the light switches dispirited me, their homely thoroughness, and I hesitated to switch on the overhead lights in the greenhouse where Aunt Frances coaxed into frail growth what Arthur then had planted in the garden. The garden just behind the greenhouse sloped toward the raspberry patch and what would be tomatoes and lettuce. Exotic, coddled, fragile fruits, like the fig trees, were covered in carpet; the strawberry beds were blanketed in straw, and only asparagus grew unimpeded by the fluctuating cold. Baskets, shears, twine for tying up — who would do this work now that Arthur was dead?

Aunt Frances at the funeral said, “We’ll have to find someone, but I don’t know how.”

Arthur had said he wanted to see the country, but he had only his Sundays off — and only one vacation in all the years. Totem poles were what he said he best remembered; but the soggy trip explained his understanding of Mother’s need for sunshine: Florida in a box Arthur built for her to lie in. Arthur, on vacation in the north woods, slept fitfully. A week was all it was, and it must have been enough for him; besides, Arthur was needed on the lake. Uncle Billy needed Arthur to settle the groundswork, needed Arthur to negotiate with the quarry and so finish the rock garden; Uncle Billy needed Arthur to make note of the work to be done and to get estimates and to calculate the cost. This is a big place, goddamnit, Uncle Billy was saying. Electricians and tree surgeons, contractors, painters, sailmakers, plumbers — Arthur knew where to find such men, knew them by first name. Some of them, Ray, for instance, Mr. Hornburg and Gassmussen, were like Arthur and volunteered for charitable causes. Arthur liked to play Santa for sick kids, and Arthur must have had more of a life than this, more than just the one I saw in the garage, but I never asked him really.

Oh, all those many ways I didn’t know Arthur!

He must have had a hobby — look at the way he kept the garage! He must have had interests — look … but I didn’t, had never … hopelessly self-involved.

From the lake-facing rooms in Uncle Billy’s house I saw the lawn’s precipitous drop to a shoreline propped with rocks, and I went there and walked around the boathouse snarled with whips of forsythia not yet bloomed. Arthur would have to die in such a month as this when the light hurt, when the pinked bark of bare trees and sodden beds of last year’s leaves, the simple barrenness of things, strained my eyes, and I could make out no shore but fuzzed horizon. Sad or thuggish month March, pricked with deceiving, infant colors: chick-yellow, baby-pink, and quickly fading violet. The forced hyacinth blooms, although fragrant, looked plastic; no wonder then that I saw cheap when I thought of Arthur’s casket, saw turquoise when I put him in a suit.

I walked back to the garage and found the door to his apartment was open — so Aunt Frances had come, I thought. She had neatened his rooms. The mail was unopened and on the table, in her hand, was a list: Goodwill, Gassmussen, sink. I guessed she had been in Arthur’s closet; Aunt Frances had picked out a suit and watered his exhausted plants: on a tiered and tottering stand, African violets, so dusty and rag-eared, they looked to be a hundred … almost as old as Arthur was, Arthur, here from the beginning.

I opened his bed.

The light turned the paper shades into tea-colored parchment, and the heat, not long off, meant the bedroom still had his smell, a close, fruity smell as of a used comb while the rough sheets on his bed were oddly odorless. I shuffled my feet under the covers, then curled and was still and when I woke, I was not so surprised to be in his bed as to remember that Arthur was dead. “When I woke, it was dark; when I woke, the driveway lights goldly framed the shades, halfway soothing.

MOTHER

MOTHER GUESSED SHE MUST have been sitting on the shelly edge of the Pacific, tadpoling in the ocean when Nonna died.

And what had she been doing when my father died? Did she remember, or was it up to me to remake him? I wanted to ask did she know on the instant where she stood that he was dead? “Was she struck in the side as by a sword, was she blinded? Surely she was overcome when she was told, and then when it appeared to be a suicide? What then?

Mother said, “Suicide is Uncle Billy’s story — not mine.”

My father was meant to be on business; a briefcase was found in his car. A briefcase — certainly his — was found open, stuck between the seats, its paper contents in the current, its clasp a flash. She didn’t know how anything looked; she only imagined the car under water and Father’s body, still belted, knocking against the steering wheel in easy, constant motion.

Count the dead, a pile-up in months! A mound, a death mound, the kind Aunt Frances had pointed out when I was a child, and Arthur was driving us to town. Arthur, always obliging and patient, how kind he was to me; he only ever wanted to help me with my math; Arthur only wanted me to try the word problems.

“But not now,” I said to Arthur. “Don’t ask me to do that now.”

I wanted to drive past our house, the first house, mine and my mother’s and father’s. I wanted to dream over it, and, like my mother, see ghosts.

“But we don’t have the time,” and so we came back from town with stapled bags of pills for Nonna. We came back with soggy packages, me calling out to Nonna as I took myself upstairs, “Guess what Mother sent this time!”

Bits of cloth and cowries.

In California, Mother asked me, “What did you do with what I used to send you? Did you wear it?”

In Mother’s stories of those times when we were apart, she was on the beach; she was sad in these stories but brave. She was sick, yet she had checked herself out of that slumberous place where her eyes were always greasy. She had checked herself out of the San — her name — and had left with the fat man, the one she loved best. Two crazies! Mother was thousands of miles away from me — and in love, too, with her fat man — yet she sometimes had to work at being happy. On the holidays she pretended it was any day at all — nothing special — just another island day, a high-July color, unadulterated blues and reds. “I wanted snow!” Mother said, but she pretended she was in the middle of an ordinary, midsummer, gorgeous day, not Christmas. She pretended she didn’t miss me; and besides, she was in love at the time. She was in love in a new way, loving the fat man’s imperfections, the damp white excesses of him — wheezy body parts, bad teeth, bulgy eyes in fervid glaze when he saw her. Close to tears, crying often, the fat man was real, not something she had made up. She could love him, and she did!

But I had heard enough. “Tell me something else!”

In California, Mother made up a new past I didn’t always know about. Once, mucking avocados for a California dip, a woman asked, “Do you have any of your father’s sculpture?”

“I sold it all,” I said, thinking quickly.

The guest said, “You’re sorry, I bet.”

I was sorry he never had been a sculptor, never had been an occupation a person could give details to. My father had worn a suit and dressed for a place I never did see; he swung a briefcase that was ruined with him. As someone once said — maybe even my father—“A man sounds like money when he makes money.” Did his pockets chink? Did he carry more than pencils in his briefcase?

“We could always use more money,” Mother said.

To the terrible Walters, to all of the boyfriends, we had both of us said, “We could use it!”

“You can always find things to sell,” Mother counseled.

“I have,” I told her, but I didn’t always confess what of hers I had sold. No, I didn’t want to tell her what I owed the dead man Walter, and I tried not to use any names that might hurt her. The woman, the one who said she had always been my mother no matter how far away she had lived, was sicker every summer, it was clear — more and more time, she spent in bed. I began to confuse her with Norma.

“Mother?” I asked, standing near to where she slept.

Little governess, light as cinder in a black stuff dress, she is tenacious of life and wants vision and practical experience and wider company. In another century she would not marry but would write. Jane would write — not Mr. R. Mr. Rochester is only confessionally garrulous, but Jane, Jane Eyre is a talker of such succinct or impassioned, memorable speech as in, how to avoid the burning pit of hell? “I must keep in good health, and not die.”

My mother was once a talker. She named us all — cars and children. Then one summer she began to stammer. Living indoors in California, sleeping through the afternoon, she woke making thick and broken utterance. She could start a sentence but found it hard to finish. The next summer — worse — she couldn’t begin. She had to be prodded.

“Mother? Mother? What do you want?”

Then, when she was dumb in this way, I was cruel. I told it to her face: I gave her a fuller inventory than ever I had before of what of hers was gone. Why did I tell her except that I did. The handkerchief table, the silver tea service. And California — when I looked up from the packing list, I saw that California, too, was disappearing. The soiled carpet underfoot was dank, and only the cats got fed. We ate stale chips for dinner.

“Who’s driving to Vons for salsa?” I asked, but we stayed at home and went out less and less.

I said, “I’m nearly almost always broke myself.”

Mother asserted, “We’re in for it now, believe me. …”

One summer we stayed whole days indoors and watched the light move frantically between the slats of the shuttered windows. I lay in bed and wondered what had happened to Mother’s wand. Her bedside drawer — I had looked — was empty. I thought about buying gel for myself, but more and more, like Mother, I slept. I slept until she woke and called out, “Look …”

Nothing, junk — but we watched it. I got in bed with Mother and watched in the dark. Later, staring at me — me going downstairs for water — she said, “Why don’t you take better care?”

Another time she said, “I’m sorry you’re lonely.”

But something about her voice, the way she spoke, made me think she wasn’t sorry at all, and I hated her, and I said, “I wish getting old didn’t mean growing ugly.”

We had this in common: The men we had loved, and even some of those we hadn’t, all were dead.

“All this to have happened already, and you’re so young!” she said to me. “Really.”

In California, I closed off, avoided, walked past rooms, living mostly in the bedroom and talking about what I would do if only I had money. I would travel!

Mother said, “Oh … have one of your funny cigarettes.”

Mother scratching my back felt good, too, then, and sometimes Mother would go on scratching until her hand made a jerked motion, and she began to snore — most times lightly.

I let the TV flicker. I killed the sound. I rolled something small to sleep by.

WEST SEVENTY-SIX

“WHAT DO YOU THINK,” is Dr. O’s answer.

I think if I could only stay awake and concentrate on a soothing hobby all would be well.

SHORT IDENTIFICATIONS

I WAS HOPING FOR the discovery of a rich uncle from Madeira.

I was waiting for the will to be read.

The years clacked past: Father, Nonna, Arthur, Mr. Early, and Walter, of course — the terrible Walter! my own, too full of toxins, still terrible — dead. The Walter-years, those years … made me sleepy, and the lawyer’s secretary brought me water because I could not stay awake.

His lawyer asked, “Is this your signature,” and I had to say it was, which meant I owed — for damages, for something — I had signed in front of Walter.

His lawyer said, “You can pay back slowly.”

“But the months go by so fast!”

The yellow fall was almost past, and I was thirty.

I thought of hurtful people. My head was on fire with thinking of them, and I had to remind myself, in the most deliberate way, to think of the kind and forgiving. Mr. Early, Mr. Early, Mr. Early, a teacher in college who went by his initials RWD, another teacher, an absentminded—but brilliant! — woman not to be trusted, and yet I loved her, too. She came to Thursday classes in a pleated skirt, silk, bowtied blouse, pearls; more than once I saw her face was half made-up, one eye scant of mascara. She was off-kilter in such ways. She was a tipsy mischief-maker at the end of the table, a quickly spilled voice, a gossip — dangerous! I wanted her for a mother when she had her best friends already — all famous — yet she said, “If you ever need help …” Did she mean I could ask?

“Yes,” says the lawyer and he hands me a pen.

I can pay — I will pay — if I’ve done the math right it will take me five years. Not so bad.

Stringent and inviolate are words the students should learn; and some lines I ask to be read aloud, or I read them, “‘Believe in heaven. Hope to meet again there.’ What does this say about Jane’s character?” I ask. The students make exasperated faces. Most of them get mad at her or don’t care what she does, if only she would get to it. Make a life in the brisk climes, honest and alone, or travel with your lover undercover in warm places, but in less than forty pages, please! “Yes, yes, yes,” I agree, “and why resist the sea and the comfort of his villa?”

MOTHER

I WAS THE CHIEF — our only—subject after Mother was moved from assisted living, from elevators, meals, activities, pets to the Birdcage, her name. The last home before the last. The Birdcage, as she once called it, the Nursing Home. Home! The word was obscene when attached to the swabbed, two-story, flung-out building with its enormous, linoleum sunroom. There, mid-morning, the half dead were parked in their chairs, and I found Mother asleep.

The nurses said go ahead, go outside, the malls down the road. “She’s best in the late afternoon.”

Awake, Mother made fists and swung stiffly and helplessly at the nurses, saying she could walk, saying Arthur would pick her up, she didn’t belong here, this wasn’t her watch.

“Could you sign this, Mother?” I asked and held out bank business I didn’t understand. I thought of my own damages; I thought to myself — don’t sign! But Mother did.

The handwriting was thin, unfinished: Moth. “Your real name, Mother!” I shouted. “Write that.” But Mother was become the shivery moth of her signature, the bald, breastless mother of the stories she once loved, the ones that told of women wide-open in pursuit. Their shrouds wisped, and the women howled; they traveled with potions and spells.

“May you be so lucky!” Mother had said and said to me. “May you never suffer like this!”

Now she hardly spoke. She could have been Nonna.

I show Mother her brother’s handwriting; I unfold the recipe he sent. The formula to Fivey’s milk punch: 3 quarts of milk, 1 pint of rye or blended whiskey, 3 ounces of dark rum, 7 ounces of brandy, 12 teaspoons of sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract; stir rapidly while mixing to keep the milk from curdling.

When I ask, “Do you remember milk punch?” Mother cries.

Tickets to the desert — I had accepted them from Uncle Billy; only now there was no message from him, no letter from Madeira, no comfortable inheritance to live on — and Mother was dying in a nursing home, expensively and slowly. Mother was hardly moving — straws in all the glasses, Kleenex, pills — the body’s litter, skinflakes large enough to be identified, flew in a dust when the nurse beat her pillows. How many times had I been to the Birdcage? I sat in a small chair near to her bed and said, “I think it’s nice here, Mother, don’t you?” and she made as if to speak and then she didn’t.

Mother was clearly, definitely, finally dying; and I had helped her to it, asking all those summers, “Can I get you more to drink?”

Returned, at school, I write on the board:

“‘I had not the qualities or talents to make my way very well in the world; I should have been continually at fault.’”

Identifications. Give the significance of. The instructions are always the same: “Look at the clock occasionally to see how much time you have left.”

FATHER

HIS BOOKPLATED BOOKS SHOW my father had affection for bullying poets — hairy, bearish, mad. The poet found naked on the road with arms outspread declaiming Milton and stopping cars, this poet’s books, in hardcover and paperback, and his collected prose and a biography and books of criticism take up an entire shelf. But what did my father think about?

I once knew what my mother thought about; she thought about expensive things and ownership, uselessness, loss. She had talked about the dead and was not afraid of dying because she believed she would join them — her mother and father, and those great-greats unmet. Whenever Mother spoke of her dead — and she once spoke of them often — I saw drifts of sheer hankies brushing against each other and so talking. Mother then had no plans for her body.

“You pick a place, Alice, scatter me. That will be fine,” she had said, “that will be sufficient.”

But I was talking about my father. My father is buried far from the church he attended in the years that he was married. Six. The years seem not so many now. Six years married. Twenty-five years now dead. Dead at thirty-seven, of an accident, a car accident (they said), drowning. A morning storm caught so many cars on their way to work, they said.

“Besides,” they said, “he was a bad driver.”

They said, “Read the papers from the time. His name is there.”

A mean rain runneled over blinded cars stalled along the highway on the day my father died. Spring. He took the old road that ran along the lake and somehow — was it slick or fog? — slipped off the road and onto the lake where the rain-pocked ice gave way on a breath and down went the car and its driver. Minutes was all it took. Eight, nine, ten, my guess. Ten, my age, when age began to matter, and Mother’s terrible Walter said, “You look good enough to eat,” and he licked his lips at me and farted. But my father—

Sometimes it is not the lake but a river that feeds into the lake that drowns him. There is no briefcase in the river, no falling through peated water. “When my father drowns in the river, he is naked. The water carries his body fast.

My father has no body. No spittled lips, no smells. Fished out of the lake or out of the river, my father is washed featureless, sodden and dark I have to fight the impulse to kick him. “You!” I frown — a girl, disgusted—“Why is it always you I am thinking of!”

(My head is on fire like this sometimes.)

THE DREAM

HE SAYS WHAT THEY all say, “We tried. It didn’t work.”

He says, “I think I’m only good for the money.”

I grip the briefcase between my legs so that when he pulls, as he is forced to pull, the handle hurts me, but I don’t cry. I say, “Daddy, please,” and I watch him turn away.

My head hurts, and I am running after in my nightgown on the lawn. I’ll do myself damage.

“I will!” I insist, knowing as I do that the use of a knife on a calloused place doesn’t hurt so much, and there is blood enough to scare. “Look!” I stand on one foot with a knife in my hand, shouting after him, “I’ll do it!” But he pays me no attention; he starts the car. He says, “I’ve seen that trick before.”

“You want more?” I ask and make to use the knife on my hand, even though he isn’t looking at me. He is headed in the other direction away from where we live, Mother and I, both of us cut up and calling, “Don’t leave!” We are very dramatic.

One time Mother was on the bed, arms out, legs spread as one fallen back on snow, an angel-maker distracted by the task — cracked lips, eyes closed.

“Mother,” I asked, already dialing. “Come quick,” I told Arthur. “We’re in trouble.”

Arthur got down on his knees and let me ride his back.

He made her Florida.

It was cold where we lived; I was most often thirsty.

MOTHER

SITTING ASKEW IN HER wheelchair, Mother spoke to me of me. She said, “That Alice! She never visits!” Her voice, when she said this, was full of malice and glee. She looked mad. She said her hair was heavy on her head. “I can see as well as anyone,” Mother said. “I know who you think you are. …”

I acted surprised and delighted when really I was afraid.

So many dead — Father, Arthur, Nonna — soon, I thought, there will be no one to remember us.

I sometimes said Uncle Billy’s name on purpose and watched Mother grow frantic until she scared me, and I ran from her room calling, “Nurse!”

I didn’t know a single nurse by name. I did not often visit.

“Any luggage?” they asked at the Gingerbread Inn.

“How long have you been gone from here? How long have you been away?”

And what’s it to you? I wanted to say. I am not despairing by the roadside. I have more than gloves to sell if I should run out of money. See these pearls around my neck? I kept them after all. But I could sell them if I had to. “Who would ever know what Nonna had promised Mother, then given to me, was gone?

So much gone. Uncle Billy had sold his house and Nonna’s house and moved to the desert.

ANY HOUSE

“I CAN LIVE ANYWHERE easily — have done.” My boast, but I believe it. I am resilient. “Small but wiry” was what Mother used to say, and I am. Arthur would be proud. And Mr. Early, too, writing to me at the end, “I just want you to keep on going pretty much the way you are.”

I miss the touching ways of men.

I miss my mother the way I think I will when she is dead.

TUCSON

“WE NEVER THOUGHT YOU’D come!” they say, these bent, wish-boned people, my Uncle Billy, my Aunt Frances.

Their new man says, “Howdy-do from all of us.” He tells me Uncle Billy has a new project, a new wall, the start of a third terrace. They have their voices, my Uncle Billy and my Aunt Frances. They can see, they can walk, they can reason — the problem is breath, breathing, oxygen. Air! Tucson helps. Already a rope-thick vine, a cactus with inch-long, lion-like prickers, jags up the new wall. The desiccated landscape with its menacing cactus is exquisitely, adamantly alive, though it looks dead.

“Look what he’s done,” Aunt Frances says: walls, awnings, raised beds, gardens. The lap pool’s blue-black tiles color the water such a blue I want to dive in — immediately! And the water, I am sure, must be warm. I know the way they live. I know the room they will give me at the other end of the house will be far enough away for me to talk to myself. There I can blow smoke out of the skylights or crawl along the floor to smell the rosewatery smell of Aunt Frances. “Mi casa es su casa”—pliant pillows, tender beds, blocks of blue shadow to rest in, blocks of white sun.

A girl once, I used to grind against the paths, prospecting in the high-season. High-season: one of the reasons I am here, the other has to do with Mother.

I am the daughter, the namesake, over twenty-one. Do the nurses phone me first? Must I be the one to say no, to look at the accountings, to oversee the dribble? (Last month, her front tooth cracked off. At first I told the nurses no, we will leave Mother as she is, but later I said yes, take her to the dentists. Whatever is the best he can do, he should do it.)

“I don’t want this job much longer,” I say, addressing Uncle Billy, but Aunt Frances speaks for them both.

“We’re too old, Alice,” she says. “Uncle Billy has trouble breathing.”

In the house of complete collections was there ever any room for children?

Aunt Frances says, “We have our money, it is true. Lots of money. Nevertheless, I balance my checkbook, don’t you?”

“I have decided on a long time between visits,” I say, talking at dinner about Mother and how it is with her all day in a wheelchair. She worries over the way the nurses have dressed her. She pulls at her windbreaker when it bubbles in the wind, pulls and smoothes with her trembling, twisted-up hands. Leisure pants, thin tennis shoes — her footwear need not be substantial: She does not walk. She sits after breakfast in her chair in the sun. She lists in her chair, and her toes point downward. Her feet dangle and point downward with a little girl’s insouciance, and she scratches her unshaven ankles with her feet. From a distance, she is a little girl, but close up she is scaly, uneven, coarse and brown. The brown has to do with her mouth — and not the vague discolorations on her cheeks — but her mouth. Tobacco-colored spit stains the corners of her mouth. I am describing Mother parked in the sun after breakfast, growing sleepy yet fully dressed and expectant of someone else. “I know who you think you are, who you think,” Mother says when I step from behind the nurse repeating, “It’s me, Mother, Alice. Alice, remember? Your daughter?”

She says, “My daughter is pretty.”

“My mother, too.”

She says, “I know who you …” She is disappointed. I think she does not like what she sees — and why should she? She pushes her dessert away and rocks in her chair. She looks very old, but Mother is the youngest at her table. Mother is the youngest woman at a table of women, all many years older, two deranged, one spastic, and they eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. Every day at this table, and yet Mother cannot keep up with the oldest of them, who snipes at her whenever she plays the baby. I should have been an actress was what Mother used to say. The fork shakes in her hand — too heavy. She lets it drop, and then the oldest shrills at the nurses, “Don’t feed her. She’s not a baby. She can feed herself.”

“Can you, Alice?” the nurse asks Mother. (Only the nurses know everyone’s name.) “Do you need a little help, Alice? You like dessert. You know you like dessert. But maybe it’s your daughter’s here. She’s here, isn’t she. And you’re excited. You’re too excited to eat, aren’t you, Alice. Alice,” the nurses say, “this is your daughter, Alice. This is Alice, isn’t this?”

Mother says to me, “I know who you are …,” and I think she does not like what she sees. I think she thinks my face is a pail full of worms, and Mother knows. She knows about beauty. She knows about death, too, only now she seems afraid of it.

Uncle Billy says he doesn’t want to hear anymore! He is waving his hands at me, saying, “That’s my baby sister you’re talking about.”

Uncle Billy says, “Come on. Before dessert, I want to show you something. I want you to see a new project.”

His canister of air clanks over the stone patio. “You must have noticed,” he says, “a lot has changed.”

“Yes.”

“Over there, the cactus garden.”

“Yes, yes.” Something newly made or found around every corner. Uncle Billy has taken his ease and enjoyed his money, his money and his wife’s money, the piles of it. The ha-ha bets with his also-rich friends—“A hundred dollars says I can.” Often he won, but how much did it cost, I wonder, to haul a lake for whatever was lost from a dead man’s car. “It’s there,” Uncle Billy had insisted, drawn on by the corsair’s adventure of finding the jewel case with all of Mother’s trinkets, but why would the jewel case be in father’s car? Mystery! Searches and constructions and destructions with powerful machinery and smeary men for Uncle Billy to boss: This was his business. What days tracking pleasure! I went along on the smaller excursions, to the Winter Boat Show and Oktoberfest and once to Little Poland. There we stopped at the Legion Hall just to jumble through the jumble sale, to see what merrymaking people were after. Uncle Billy bought me a netted bag of marbles, all color of cat’s eyes and crystals — emeralds, diamonds, sapphires, rubies. Another time at the Falls, at a yard sale, we were walking through a dead lady’s house. Arthur found a tool kit and Uncle Billy bought it. He bought a box of two-inch nails — never opened, never used — and a bread knife he thought Arlette might like. Uncle Billy had a care for everyone. Arthur was given a household tool kit, and Aunt Frances, a thousand-piece puzzle. He gave himself the nails. “And scissors. Good scissors. You can never have too many of these, Alice. Pick a pair.” When Uncle Billy looked at me in this way and talked directly and cheerfully about our life, I was happy, and I wanted to walk the yard sale again, but he changed direction. His sudden, wandering attention made him turn away in a loose, goofy, goose-stepping way that yet wasn’t funny to me, that seemed cruel to me. How could he lose interest in what we were doing together, but he did and was speaking to himself. “I’ve got a plan,” he was saying when I had caught up near the car, and we were off again, Arthur driving. Uncle Billy with his lurched way of showing he was happy, his sudden, “Let’s take a trip!” Wild Billy, Uncle Billy was looking at me, asking then, “Are you enjoying yourself, Alice?” Uncle Billy was bouncing in his seat, fussing with the power window — up-down, up-down — until he got it right. Right enough or large enough, first on the lake to put in his boat, first to hang it from the boathouse ceiling. Wrapped in canvas, girdled, strung up with chains like a winch-lifted animal, the boat I once spied through the boathouse windows wasn’t used very much, even in summer.

When did Uncle Billy sell the boat, I wonder, and what is in the boathouse now? Who lives in Uncle Billy’s house, and how have they changed it?

That house. I never thought the last time I saw the house would be the last. The felt-lined, felt-protected feel of the house, how softly every light switch went on. More than the collections themselves — the seashells, arrowheads, bullets from the desert — the underlit glass cases of Uncle Billy’s collections, the very glass itself, sobered me. I walked past with my arms crossed to quell the urge to kiss it, the glass, to feel it warm against my lips and see my lips’ wrinkly impress.

I think I will not talk anymore about Mother.

“You’re to enjoy yourself, Alice,” Aunt Frances says, straightening my place mat, saying, “Sit down for dessert and enjoy yourself.”

I enjoy the light, the enticement of the sunset when the desert is a softness that in noon-light was revealed as hooked and dangerous.

“I am not going to see her anymore,” I say — I blurt really.

Aunt Frances says, “No more now, Alice, please.”

“I am no help. I upset the nurses. I sit on the edge of Mother’s bed and trip its alarm.”

I am about to say more when the lights dim and the swing doors to the kitchen swing open, and here comes the cook with dessert on a cart. “Surprise!” says Uncle Billy.

“Occasion?” Aunt Frances says, “Must there be an occasion? No occasion. “We are happy you are here is all, Alice.”

Do they love me? Are we home?

Aunt Frances leans in, and Uncle Billy says, “Look,” and the cook puts a match to the dessert.

Clouds blow up in the late afternoons. I read. I nap.

I walk in the desert carefully. I know about snakes.

I take a late-night swim in the lap pool and astonish myself with the color of my skin. My hair is not long; it dries quickly. I don’t need a towel for anything, and I am not afraid of being seen. I am far away from the master-expanse of the house, and the house is asleep, and Uncle Billy and Aunt Frances are asleep. They are all nearly all asleep — poor Mother.

How did you get here? is Mother’s question of me whenever I visit, and I wonder, how did I? Mother thinks I swam. Mother thinks she will swim, or else Arthur will drive her to Florida.

Aunt Frances has the new man drive us to the mountains in the jeep. Uncle Billy stays at home wheezing breaths and watching old TV. The cowboys skid their horses to a stop; the popgun action is fast. Uncle Billy is slow; nothing left fast about him. Uncle Billy must attend to his breathing, and so we are leaving him home and driving into the mountains in the jeep. The jeep is common; it has no name, is no Emerald Gem, no Mouse. My mother’s names, all; maybe Mother is me poet? Aunt Frances is no mother, never was a mother, doesn’t know. Aunt Frances is looking westward when, “What do you say to our view?” she asks. This has happened before to me: Two women, disparate ages, look out and smile at what they see, but so much of what I see turns into what is missing. Now it is Mother in the Rapunzel shirt when I am in the desert with Aunt Frances and watching where we walk because of hedgehog cactus, brittlebush, cholla; we walk into the desert to a bouldered clearing high enough to see … what? The distances remind me of the city. Two hundred acres Aunt Frances owns. She is philosophic: She says it really isn’t hers, but when she grinds her cane against the ground, I expect it to bleed.

“I was a snowbird,” she says. “I never thought to be here, but here I am in the desert, and I am happy.”

Back at the jeep is the new man waiting in his uninspired clothes. Duane, Dale, Dan, Don, the new man is a kind of Arthur or that’s what it seems until he drives us north and speeds. Aunt Frances says to him, “Not so fast, please. We want to see.” But the road invites it, his speeding. “Please,” she says, and he does slow down, but the road teases him forward, and he drives fast again, and then he is not an Arthur but one of those nameless unreliables, and Aunt Frances is yelling at him, the same way she yelled at all those other unreliables who balked and complained and stole from her. One of them stole the old jeep. The jeep we ride in now is sturdier; the drive isn’t a clatter, but the speed is a problem. Why? Who is this? Who is our driver and how did he come by the keys? Aunt Frances is crying! She could be embarrassed. We are driving in a sheer way. “I miss your Uncle Billy,” she says, and Aunt Frances is crying, and I am surprised by her crying. How dependent she is — and in love? All these years I have believed what Mother said was true. I can hear Mother in her brute voice saying, men are treacherous, love is petty, everyone cheats.

When we get home, the driver says, “I got you home.”

“So you did”: from Aunt Frances. Her hair is confused; her clothes look misbuttoned and odd.

Uncle Billy and Aunt Frances sit across from each other in the glassed-in patio. Their bodies, plump commas, are slumped in easy chairs. The sunset, too, is mushy. Aunt Frances and Uncle Billy look at each other, bemused, happily exhausted. “What a day!” Aunt Frances says, and Uncle Billy agrees, and I wonder, will Aunt Frances tell him what the new driver did? They talk in code about the house and the desert: And the garden? Called Mellon What did he say? The same. How much? One fifty. Only? Yes. When? Their patter! Aunt Frances says nothing about the drive home through the desert; she smiles right past the subject, leans forward, and takes up Uncle Billy’s hand. “I think Alice was surprised,” she says, and then to me, “weren’t you, Alice? You didn’t expect to see so much land.” I am sitting between them at their feet, level with the coffee table, near the tea and crackers. Aunt Frances is petting Uncle Billy’s hand as she speaks, keeping him in the room and awake. With some surprise I see again how she loves him. “Want a cracker, Bill,” she says. (This, too, has happened before only with Nonna and a parrot.) Aunt Frances pours the still-warm sun tea over glasses brimmed with ice. The ice cracks and pops and is the only sound in the glassed-in patio. If I had any paper I would draw it, this scene — their hands, the glasses — but I would want to get it right.

ANY HOUSE

“I CAN LIVE ANYWHERE easily — have done.” Said often. What a shrugged tough I am, a spoiled pouter at seventeen and eighteen and so on — me, insisting, “I can live anywhere easily — have done.” Some of the bluster sounds like Mother, but this much is true: I am no stranger to working on my knees. I show up on time; I earn money. I wish Arthur were here and Mr. Early, too: just to see me! Still a kid! I miss them all, all the fathers.

THE DREAM

HE WINKS WHEN HE sees me; he rubs his bristled face against my hand. Next he is driving away. Implacable wind snakes the grasses, storming. Upset sky! I am standing under it, but he is not. How is it then he can rub his bristled face against my hand? Against my hand and the inside of my wrist, my arm.

My mother, alive in the waked world, is much farther away.

MR. EARLY

HE IS DANCING ON his toes, springing sprung rhythm, whoop-whooping over the sound the poet makes:

Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.

I read some of the same poems Mr. Early once read to us. The death-parts pinch more, and I have cried. I do not think Mr. Early ever cried, although he stood on his desk when he wanted our attention. I saw him jump around the room when the answer he wanted was wrong, yet he went on urging, “Come on, come on.” And when I got it right: “Buy this girl whatever she wants!”

Mr. Early said a teacher has license to be loopy, to shout out favorite lines and sing, “Because she knows in singing not to sing.” Mr. Early liked his Robert Frost.

I see myself at fourteen, still in the draught of father-loss, ashamed to forget, yet forgetting.

Mr. Early said the poets are forgiving.

I wander in bookstores; the fear of doing something ugly and private in front of everyone no longer seizes me. I have to summon it up for a fright, and I forget to summon it up. I am happy, happier. The newness of books for the young I teach, the way they read them as if no one before had ever rightly read them or understood them, the press and the pressure of loving books, a book, a book of poems, a poem and the poet who wrote it, and then the sorrow to discover the poet is dead! “We can only meet in air,” says the dead poet. We mourn them, my students and I; they live on in their verses. I am the go-between in this romance, stalled in the clogged hallway between classes, in the breakup between classes. Even before they speak to me, they are out of breath and urgent and surprised by an older face close up.

FLORIDA

WHEELCHAIR FRIENDLY AND CONSOLATORY! Our weight triggers open the doors, and the walk to the ocean slopes through cared-for grounds: pond plants, sheafed grasses, and fanned things that sway. The trees at the shore are full of shade. The benches look out: blue solace and space. “Can you see the boats, Mother?” In the distance, boats, breasted, near the mark, then cruelly yank about. We are missing only their sound as they break against the water. “How?” Mother starts, then lapses into wonder.

I will begin with her father and his ever-polished trophies in their glass case: Yes, he was a sailor! and her mother from a family with old jewels in the vault, yet Nonna liked to be mistaken for the help whenever she was found in her garden with Arthur and his men, all of them on their knees in mud. “Deadheading,” she explained to strangers come looking for the Missus. … Yes, the president of the company’s wife looks like help, but this is her garden where one day her daughter will be wed. Will be? She was! At the top of the hill, Mother — my own — on her brother’s arm, started down the rock paths carpeted for the occasion all the way to where the garden leveled theatrically, spaciously, and twelve bridesmaids, and as many ushers, waited.

Frances is matron of honor and William, Junior — Billy to everyone — Billy is playing Mother’s father and talking of the gold to be found in the desert. He teases Mother. He tells a story on his sister.

Bad, bad girl, that Alice. What did she see?

Look at the matron of honor and guess. Frances, with her difference, her torch of hair, a red of such deep hue and thickness it forever inspires regret, Frances blushes. She will fade, they say. Surely she will, but on the day Mother marries, the lilt of bridesmaids in high color is a very garden itself, and the man my mother marries says so. He is a poet. He is a poet, and she is poetical, and they marry in Nonna’s white garden.

The underside of leaves, the slime and slugs — no, no snakes, not in any of the gardens.

One year Mother is married in her mother’s white garden and the next, in a different garden — shaggy, overgrown, more gingham than the damask of the Big House garden — a namesake, another Alice, is christened. Aunt Frances and Uncle Billy are godparents. They have no children of their own; but this child often visits.

Why?

Mother is tired sometimes.

And my father? What of him?

He looks like Ralph Marvell from the Wharton novel. He is fair and pretty; his profession is ambiguous.

I don’t know his part and my mother cannot help. The tangle of live-wires I think of as her brain cross and spark, misfire, smoke. This, and the salty, cold fumes rising off the sea, worries her face. She blinks and focuses intensely on the passing shapes. Her eye’s expression is as cruel as a parrot’s.

The spectacle of Mother in the Birdcage dying: I do and I do not want to see it.

“When I show her pictures of men I have loved, she says, “What a face!” and she frowns.

“Oh, Mother!”

Mother is a hitch, a terror, or an intermittent hurt. She is a black slot, a swallower, nearly out of money.

But what of this?

The wind is an assault and the sound of water bewilders her, and I wonder: What does she think? Does she think?

“I have to go home now, Mother.” Good-byes, those little deaths, rasp my throat, but I am not sure she has heard what I have said. I am not sure she understands what we are looking at: so much water and the line that is the other side. Mother is in the sun; she is in her Florida. Squinting in that tin box of refracted light, she has to frown to see, and what does it mean what she sees? The world is a comfort and then it is a discomfort. Mother is all thin hair and vacancy, tears and starts, a small clutch of bones, an old woman, grown innocent.

Who will forgive me if I do not come again?

“Alice,” she speaks, and she looks at me, and it has been a long time since Mother has used my name, which is also her name, as a good-bye, and I think she knows, as once she knew, what will happen to us. “Alice,” she repeats. It may be no other words will follow or it may be a downpour of speech.