They May Not Mean To, But They Do

29

In Los Angeles, it was January and it was springtime. Molly saw a hermit thrush. Hummingbirds flitted in and out of white flowers shaped like bells. Pink buds of jasmine hung over the fence ready to burst into bloom. At the beach, surfers slid into the waves with the garish sunset behind them. Finches began to sing. She took one class to Catalina each week to photograph a cave painting and map the area around it. They used a software program that had originally been developed by NASA for the study of photographs of Mars.

“Mars,” her mother said when Molly told her about the project. “Well, well. Digital tracing. Isn’t that nice.”

“I knew you’d be interested.”

“Oh, of course.”

Molly told her about the bits of ocher the digital tracing had connected, and if her mother sounded less enthusiastic than Molly had expected, Molly attributed that to the weather. The weather was terrible in New York. It snowed and the bitter wind blew, and Joy could not leave her building.

“Well, this will cheer you up, Mom. One of the grad students in engineering built a drone and we attached a 3-D camera and…”

Joy drifted from room to room, listening, aimless, trapped.

It wasn’t that Joy expected her daughter, and certainly not her son, to come live with her. They had their own lives, just as she had once had her own life. She did expect something from them, though, something they were not providing, she couldn’t put her finger on it. Danny was coming once a week for dinner now, Molly planned a trip to New York in the near future, and Joy waited eagerly for their visits. But visits predicted their own end, and an end to a visit meant she would be alone again.

There is a difference between solitude and loneliness, she thought, and wondered what it was.

She should have spent more time with her own mother. She should have moved in with her mother to take care of her, she saw that now. So what if her mother’s apartment had been an L-shaped studio? So what if her mother kept it at 102 degrees and could not stand the smell of any food cooking except white rice, and so what if she talked and talked and talked and lived in the past? Now that Joy was older, she understood her mother. It was cold, that was why the heat in the apartment was turned up so high. Her mother’s ceaseless talking was an activity, a way for her to be alive. As for living in the past, the past was all that was real.

Joy would move right in with her mother now, if she could. Daniel and Molly were not old enough, not lonely enough, not cold enough to understand. And what would they do with their wives? And how was it that she had a daughter and a son and they both had wives, anyway?

No one, not even an old lady, wants to live in someone else’s house. Both Molly and Daniel had asked her to move in with them, naturally, just as she had asked her own mother to move in with her. They were good, devoted children, just as she had been. They didn’t really mean it, just as she had not really meant it.

Rich or poor, her mother used to say, it’s better to have money.

Aaron, you were not a prince among men. You were not. You were a weak man. You squandered your fortune like a prince, but you were not a prince. She thought fondly of his affectations of dress, the tweed cap when other men wore brimmed hats, the custom-made English shirts and shoes. How handsome he was, his beard groomed, his hair tousled. It had been so long since she had thought of him as handsome. But now she had trouble picturing him when he hadn’t been handsome, when he’d grown bent and stiff and hollow, when his lips were chapped and his teeth dulled, when his eyes went blank, when his clothes devolved into the clothes of a small child, the elastic-waist sweatpants, the hooded sweatshirt that he could not zip himself. Those images were fading. Instead, she could feel her head on his shoulder and his hand running through her hair. She could hear his breath in her ear, feel it, soft and warm. As she tried to fall asleep each night, she saw him as she had first seen him, a young man with no beard, his eyes a watery blue, his jacket handmade in Scotland, she later discovered, his large hand held out as he asked her to dance.

The memories did not comfort her. They made her feel the years that had passed and that, like Aaron, would never return. They made her old. Sometimes, when she got up to go to the bathroom, she caught sight of herself in the mirror and thought it was her grandfather. All she had to do was spit some tobacco. The smell of her grandfather and his chewing tobacco came back to her, and she got back into bed, sleepless and sick to her stomach.

When Danny came to dinner, he always said, “I’ll bring a roast chicken from Gourmet Garage so you won’t have to cook.”

Cook? She could barely recall when she had last cooked. She did make toast. She sometimes boiled an egg. But she would not be cooking Danny a nice dinner like a proper mother, like a proper hostess, she didn’t have the strength, he was right about that. She decided she would make the table look pretty. She would use the silver. She would light candles.

She bent down and pulled out the bottom drawer in the kitchen cabinet, where the tablecloths were kept, then stood up holding a fresh bright white embroidered cloth and banged her head on a cabinet door she’d left open. She cried from pain and frustration, but forced herself on, into the dining room, to spread the cloth. But how could she spread the beautiful white cloth? The dining-room table was covered with mail and file folders; there was a tray with an egg-stained plate and a pink jammy crust of bread; large bottles of pills dozed on their sides like sea lions; magazines and catalogues and unread newspapers had slithered out from piles that had then collapsed and fanned across yet another egg-stained plate. A pile of bills, three piles of bills, each topped with a yellow Post-it that said Urgent. Joy sat at the table crying and trying to decipher the bills. They made no sense. She began to dial Molly’s number to tell her the dining-room table was a mess, as if Molly should fly in from California to straighten it up, then caught herself and hung up.

* * *

She choked when Danny came to dinner. A piece of chicken flew out of her throat and landed on her plate, slimy and colorless.

The sounds were hideous, like a crow’s, like a gasping dying crow’s. KEH-KEH-KEH. She tried to drink water. No air came in, no air went out, her throat was closed and squeezing and pushing, and out came the piece of chicken in a gush of unswallowed liquid. It lay there in a pool of water like a tiny dead baby.

Danny had been pounding her on the back. Now he stood beside her staring at the lump of flesh in its little pond. “Jesus.”

Joy patted her mouth with her napkin, then spread it over her plate, covering the chicken.

“Jesus,” he said again. He stroked her hair. “Mom, can you talk?”

Joy put her head in her hands. She could talk. But what was there to say?

* * *

“So how’s Mom?” Molly asked Daniel later that night.

“She says she’s okay. She got a piece of chicken stuck in her throat. It was disgusting. And scary.”

“But she’s okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. You know her. She’s a trooper.”

* * *

“Daniel said you seemed pretty good,” Molly said to her mother the next day.

“We had chicken.”

“Are you getting out at all? You need to get out, see your friends.”

“Oh no. Not in this weather.”

“Aren’t you going stir-crazy?”

“You know, I’m a very busy person, Molly.” Joy gazed at the datebooks splayed in front of her on the dining-room table, one of them so old the cover hung off like an empty sleeve, an amputee’s empty sleeve. “Between losing things and looking for things I’ve lost and going to the bathroom,” she said, “well, the day just isn’t long enough.”

“You’re funny.”

“I’m not trying to be.”

Molly laughed. “You really are funny. Now make a date with a friend. With Natalie. Go to the 92nd Street Y the minute it gets warm enough, okay? I’m so proud of you, Mom! Daniel’s right. You really are a trooper.”

“She’s so strong,” Molly and Daniel told each other.

“Of course she misses Dad,” they added, “we all do, but what a terrible weight she’s been carrying all these years. Now, finally, she can have some time for herself.”

“I can talk to her now, really talk to her,” they said. “About me.”

She seemed to need them more than ever, which was gratifying, but she didn’t seem to need them too much, which was more gratifying still.

* * *

When the weather warmed up and the ice turned to broad rivers of slush, Joy did try going to the 92nd Street Y, to a poetry reading.

“Count me out,” said Natalie. “Poetry is depressing at our age.”

“Why at our age particularly?”

“Because everything is depressing at our age.”

The Y was dark and frequented by women who did not bother about their hair. The screaming children running in and out, who should have cheered her (that had always been one of her theories, that the generations should mix), were unsettling. She could feel her irregular heart beating more irregularly than usual and she went home.

* * *

When Daphne got back from Florida, Joy went out again to meet her at the coffee shop. They had not seen each other since Aaron’s funeral.

Joy said, “I miss Aaron. And I don’t like being alone.”

“The first year is the worst. Then it calms down to a dull roar.”

“How’s your boyfriend from down there?” Joy asked.

“Dead.”

Daphne had two other men she “went to dinner with”: one she had picked up at a coffee shop farther downtown near her apartment, the other the widower of an old friend. But it had been a hard winter for them, and for Daphne, too: “All my boyfriends are dead.”

Joy felt dizzy. Maybe matzo-ball soup and waffles was a bad idea. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“My kids think I should consider going into assisted living.”

“Do they. Well, what do you think?”

“They worry because they’re not here. They want me to come to them in Cincinnati. Well, to a place near them in Cincinnati. I understand. But I can’t go to Cincinnati. I told them I’m staying, and it’s called ‘Aging in Place.’ That’s what the social workers call it.”

“You saw a social worker?”

“No, of course not. In Florida they talk about these things. It’s all the rage in the world of gerontology, otherwise known as Florida. Aging in Place.”

“Like running in place.”

“Going nowhere fast.” Daphne laughed.

“Whatever they call it, it’s better than a nursing home…”

“… In Cincinnati!”

“I read somewhere that Cincinnati is a very nice city. Or was it Charlotte?”

“The assisted-living place on Eighty-sixth Street is supposed to be beautiful,” Daphne said. “Leonard’s children sent him there, you know.”

“Leonard?” Leonard, their handsome classmate in college, Leonard who had proposed to her all those many years ago. A lot of men had proposed to her. Men did that in those days, proposed. Why? What was their hurry? Oh yes, the Korean War, that was it. She had expected Karl to propose, but he was more sensible than the rest of them, he was waiting until he had a decent job, that’s what he said when she told him she was going to marry Aaron. “I saw Leonard about a year ago. He drove past in a red Cadillac convertible with a woman half his age. If that.”

“He picked her up in a bar. They went to Bermuda together, and he had a heart attack and wound up in the hospital. His daughter had to fly down, and that, as they say, was the end of that.”

“He took her to Bermuda?”

Daphne nodded.

“Who goes to Bermuda?”

* * *

Joy got a bad cold after that outing. She stayed in the apartment for a week, ten days, twelve, ordering chicken soup from the coffee shop. The cold turned into bronchitis.

“Whatever you do, don’t get pneumonia,” Molly said.

Joy promised that she would not.

She wondered what her children would do if she did get pneumonia. Put her in a home? Just until you get better, for your own good. What if they decided to leave her there, for her own good? The thought kept her up that night and woke her up many nights after. They had never said anything about sending her off to an assisted-living place. They couldn’t send her against her will. They wouldn’t send her anywhere against her will! And she didn’t even have pneumonia! She told herself these things. But you never know. That was one thing she had learned over the years. You really never know anything.