They May Not Mean To, But They Do

11

Joy went to work the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. She was expected, and if she was honest with herself, she could not stand another day sitting in the hospital with Aaron.

The museum was in the process of moving to a new building that week. The little neighborhood museum devoted to preserving a small, vibrant, gritty slice of New York life, the life of pushcarts and sweatshops and vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley, was moving into a new building in a different part of town. It was going to be incorporated into a larger organization, to become a section of the City University system, where there would be more room, more money, more prestige. It was as if the drab middle-aged museum had snagged a rich dentist.

“Dr. Bergman! There you are.” The new director was a nervous, suspicious woman with a heart-shaped face instead of a heart, that’s what Joy had told Aaron, and he’d laughed. She usually introduced herself as Miss Georgia, as if she were a beauty pageant winner. “Out with the old, in with the new,” Miss Georgia was known to say. It was her mandate. It had to do with grants.

“Packed up and ready to go?” she said when she saw Joy. “The new year approaches. The movers wait for no man.”

Then, like a schoolmarm or a politician or the Wicked Witch of the West, she shook her finger in Joy’s face.

Joy, a little taken aback, recovered and jauntily waved her finger in Miss Georgia’s face in response.

By Wednesday, they were in the new building.

“It’s big and bulky and it’s cement, it’s sort of like being inside an inverted swimming pool,” she told Aaron. She smoothed his hospital gown. “There are no windows that I can see. The stairs were made by giants for giants. And inside, I couldn’t decide whether I was about to be overcome by claustrophobia or agoraphobia. Help! I wanted to say. I’m just an old lady looking for my cabinet of old tchotchkes.”

Her new department was called City Collections.

“Like a sanitation-truck company,” she said to Aaron.

She had arrived at the new building out of breath and a little confused. Her bags were heavy and she tilted noticeably to the left. Lopsided or not, she thought, here I come.

“But this is a closet,” she said when Miss Georgia showed Joy her new office.

“A storage room,” the director corrected her. “But it will do nicely. Look at all the … storage.”

The narrow, windowless room was lined by expensive-looking built-in file cabinets. There was also a table, very white and modern, and a rather worn gray chair on casters.

“But I do need a desk,” Joy said. “I mean, after all, a person needs a desk.”

“But that is your desk,” the director said, pointing to the table.

“But it has no drawers. There isn’t even a drawer for a pencil.”

“Perhaps you have a nice mug,” the director said, patting the table encouragingly. “For your pencil.”

“Do you think they’re trying to get rid of me?” Joy said to Aaron. “I don’t think they can fire me for being old, so they’ll just torment me, right? Until I leave of my own free will.”

She spooned some ice cream into his mouth.

“They’ll see how easy it is to get rid of me,” she said. “They’re in for a surprise, aren’t they, Aaron?”

* * *

Aaron was prescribed various painkillers that teenagers in shrinking Midwestern towns abused. But when asked what the pain was from, the doctors were as canny and cautious as politicians. Molly wanted to shake them. Tell us what is wrong so we can fix it, she wanted to say. He is suffering. And I have to get back to L.A. to teach. She bombarded the doctors with direct questions, but the doctors always managed not to answer directly. Aaron had bladder cancer — they would concede that much, but everyone already knew that much. Heart failure, colon cancer, bladder cancer, Alzheimer’s. Yes, yes, but what was causing this pain?

“Daddy wants a pastrami sandwich,” Joy said, coming out of Aaron’s hospital room. “Honey, did you hear me?”

Molly had just asked the resident how long her father had to live. The resident said he could die tomorrow. Or not. He could live for a year. Or not. Or more. Or not.

“New York pastrami!” the resident said. “Good sign. A man with an appetite.”

In fact, Aaron had eaten nothing but a spoonful of ice cream in days, and when Molly arrived with the sandwich, he said there was a disgusting smell in the room, waved his big hand at her, and made her take it away.

She took the pastrami sandwich, which she had gone all the way to Zabar’s to get, to the cafeteria and split it with her mother and brother.

“It shouldn’t go to waste,” Joy said.

“That doctor said Daddy could come home in a day or two,” Molly said.

Joy wagged her head noncommittally.

“So we have to think about that.”

“You do need some help, Mom,” Daniel said. “Maybe someone to live in. Just for a while.”

“Molly’s here.”

Molly said slowly, clearly, “‘Help’ as in ‘You can’t get good help these days,’ not help as in ‘My daughter is a great help.’”

“And Molly has to leave on Friday.”

“I’ll cope,” Joy said. “I always have.”

“And when you’re at work? Do you want Daddy crawling down Park Avenue with no pants on? He needs someone to watch him.”

Joy sensed that Molly was right, but she wondered if it was necessary for Molly to bark at her like that. It was certainly expeditious, that bark, for even when Molly was not right, people tended to listen to her. But not this time, Joy thought. “I’m not sending him to a home,” she said. “Period.”

“Maybe we can get a nurse’s aide to come in,” Daniel said.

“I don’t want those people in my house. A different person every day … strangers snooping around.”

“But it would be so ‘cosmopolitan,’” Molly said, her voice full of sarcasm.

“What are you, sixteen years old, Molly? Give me a break.”

Molly did not give her a break, how could she? “You have to hire someone, whatever it costs. What have you been saving for all these years? A rainy day? This is the rainy day.”

Daniel said, “If it’s the money—”

“Of course it’s the money.”

“—then we can help you out, right, Molly? I mean as long as Ruby gets into a good public high school and Cora gets into a charter school for middle school and…”

“Take from my children?” Joy made a disgusted, dismissive sound. “Out of the question.”

“Well, then you could always sell Upstate,” Daniel said.

A horrified silence.

Then, “Never.”

Joy had inherited the little house Upstate when her mother died. She had fought to keep it safe from … well, from Aaron. There was no other way to put it, though she had tried at the time. We’re putting it in a trust, she had declared. A trust in my name. To keep it safe from creditors, she’d said repeatedly. But they all knew what she meant. Safe from Aaron. The house sat on a hill above a stream in Columbia County, New York. Upstate, Joy’s mother used to say. We’re going Upstate this weekend. Upstate was where the noise and worry of the city disappeared and the stream gurgled, where the birds sang. Upstate was the fruit of her father’s labors, that’s what he used to say when he stood on the porch and looked out at the maple tree and the three birch trees and the weeping willow by the stream. It was also the fruit of his frugality, and finally of his generosity. He had worked so hard, supporting every stray uncle or aunt or cousin who wandered through his door, and there had been a mob of them. Then the Depression ended and he was a manager, and then the war ended and he was a vice president. Spend a dollar, save a dollar, he said. And one day he announced that he had a surprise, and they drove out of town and into the country to the white-shingled house. He had saved and he had invested. Upstate was his reward, a reward he left to his wife and she left to Joy.

“I am not selling Upstate. It’s all I have. Do you want me to have nothing? Nothing?”

“Yeah, Daniel. Do you want her to have nothing?” Molly said.

“Of course I don’t want her to have nothing. I just want her to hire some help.”

“So do I. But we can’t sell the house. It’s our family house.”

Daniel noticed that Molly said “we” can’t sell the house. But it was their mother’s house, not theirs. Molly spent ten days a year in the house, if that. What difference did it make to her? Daniel spent every summer there with his wife and children. He loved the house. But love and sentimentality were two different things, or they ought to be.

“It’s part of who we are,” Molly was saying. It was true she no longer spent any time there, but she thought about the house all the time. It was an anchor of some kind, an East Coast anchor. It was there, stable and firm, even if she was not.

“Why are you fetishizing this house? Mom and Dad need help, they need money to pay for the help, the house is an asset that can be liquidated. Do you want them to live in squalor so you can idealize a house you never use?”

“Children! Stop it right now.”

Molly and Daniel were quiet. They looked at her sheepishly.

“You can argue about the house after I’m dead.”

“Mom…” they both said.

“You can squabble about it then. I need peace now.”

Daniel wondered if the house was even worth anything. But it had to be worth the salary of an underpaid health-care worker.

“We just want you to hire—”

“How can I hire? I have no money! Why are you talking about real estate when your father is so sick?”

Daniel left, wanted to get home before the girls went to bed, and Molly walked with her mother back to Aaron’s room. She knew she was being selfish about the house. She did not like to think of herself as selfish.

“You know,” she said, “whatever you have to do about the house, I’m fine with it.”

Joy said, “Enough, Molly.”

“Not that you have to consult me or anything,” Molly added. “Or ask my permission.”

“I’m not selling the house with or without your permission.”

“Well, good, good. But if Daniel is right and you need money…”

“I am leaving the house to both of you. It’s all I have, and I want to leave it to my children.”

“Oh, Mommy,” Molly said, her voice tearful. She took her mother’s hand and squeezed it. “You know you don’t have to leave Daniel and me anything.”

“So you do want me to die with nothing.”

They got back to Aaron’s room just as Aaron was being hoisted from the floor beside the bed, soaked and soiled. He had lowered the bed rail. “Get off me,” he was shouting at the nurse. White, shaking, he was maneuvered back into bed by Joy and the nurse. Joy wiped him down as gently as she could, but he was a mess.

“Stop bothering me,” he kept saying. “Leave me alone, all of you.”

Joy helped the nurse attach a clean pouch. When the nurse had gone, she smoothed the sheets and poured some water, which Aaron refused to drink.

“We’ll be safer with this.” The nurse reappeared with an armful of nylon webbing. She began calmly to strap Aaron to his bed.

“What are you doing to him?” Joy cried.

“Get away from me!” Aaron said.

“Get away from him!” Molly said.

Joy lunged for the netting, trying to pull it off Aaron, but the nurse blocked her and continued with her task, saying, in the same calm way, “It’s for your safety, Aaron.”

Aaron struggled against the restraints. “Get me out of this!” His eyes rolled like a frightened horse’s. “Help! Help!”

“Nurse, please, why are you doing this? I’ll stay with him every minute, I’ll watch him, I’ll hire someone to watch him.”

“Maybe if you had arranged that earlier,” the nurse said. “But it’s too late for tonight. This is for safety, Aaron,” she said again as she wrestled him into the restraints. “Your safety.”

Aaron thrashed and scratched at the orange netting. “You!” he said, poking out a finger and aiming it at Joy. “You can’t do anything right! You can’t do anything right!”

Joy pulled her hand back from the strap she had been trying to unbuckle. The soiled towels she had used to clean him fell from her other hand to the floor.

“You can’t do anything right!” Aaron yelled again. He kept yelling: “You can’t do anything right,” his face distorted with rage. “You never do anything right! Never!”

“Aaron…”

“You did this! You did this to me! It’s your fault!! You do everything wrong! Everything!” He twisted in the netting like a huge, dying fish. His voice was hard. Spit flew from his cracked lavender lips. “You can’t do anything right,” he roared. “You can’t take care of anything.”

“Daddy, stop it. For god’s sake…”

He sneered at Joy now as he struggled in his webbing. “You can’t take care of anything, you know that? You can’t do anything right. Nothing. You can’t do anything…”

Molly steered her mother out of the room. Her father’s enraged screams followed them down the hall. “Okay,” Molly said, holding her mother’s arm, feeling the bone of the skinny arm beneath Joy’s sweater. “Okay,” she said again, but her mother said nothing, and Molly found herself looking away, ashamed, almost as if she’d walked in on her parents having sex. Or something. “Okay.”

Her mother turned on her, yanking her arm free. “I’ve had it,” Joy said fiercely, as if Molly were going to argue with her.

“Yeah,” Molly said. “Yeah. Jesus.”

“Am I not flesh?”

“I know. He’s not himself.”

“If you prick me, do I not bleed?” her mother continued. She was crazy-eyed now and walking quickly, waving her arms.

“Mom…”

“Don’t Mom me. After everything I’ve done. Everything I’ve lived with all these years. Everything I’ve had to do. I am a human being!”

Shylock, the Elephant Man. Her mother was pulling out all the stops. And why shouldn’t she? Molly felt as if she had just seen a horror film, a monster movie, and her poor father was the monster.

She coaxed her mother to a couch in the waiting room.

“I’ve had it,” Joy kept saying. “I’ve had it, I’ve had it.”

Then, almost in slow motion, she slumped forward.

She said, “Had I, haa … I…” She stopped.

“Mom?”

“Haaa daaa. I haa. I, I.” She stopped again and looked at Molly in alarm.