They May Not Mean To, But They Do

39

When she had been in Los Angeles for three days, she knew two things for certain. One: she could not spend two months with her daughter. Two: she could not spend two months with her daughter in California. The California sun was blinding, much brighter than the friendly East Coast sun. This sun was used to shining on a desert, harsh and unrelenting.

“Isn’t it beautiful, Mom? Do you see why I love it here?”

“Very nice,” Joy said.

Then there was Molly herself, as bright and unrelenting as the sun. Every time Joy put a glass down, Molly picked it up and put it in the dishwasher. The temperature was constantly shifting, depending on where that sun was and at what angle it was hitting the house, and Joy put on and took off sweaters all day long, but each time she reached for a sweater she had removed, it was gone, gone to its closet, hung up there by Molly. Books, magazines, sandwiches — they disappeared practically from Joy’s hand. Her toothbrush, which she left on the side of the sink, immediately hid itself in the medicine cabinet. Sometimes, when Joy lifted her coffee cup, a hand with a sponge swiped the spot where it had been on the table before Joy was able to take a sip.

“This is so relaxing, isn’t it, Mom?”

“Very nice.”

“Are you comfortable, Mommy? We got you a memory foam pad for the bed.”

The two girls were so thoughtful, but the bed was so high Joy had trouble getting into it. It loomed before her at night, a great bulbous affair piled with pillows, six, seven, eight pillows. The box spring and mattress and memory foam mattress pad and the down mattress pad on top of that looked like a big billowy hat that might topple off its head at any moment. It might cushion the fall in an earthquake. Then she thought, Earthquake, and could not sleep.

The jasmine bloomed, and it made her eyes water.

She uttered not a word of complaint. Molly was so happy to have her. Even Freddie seemed happy to have her here. Were they insane, both of them? She was a nuisance. Even at her best these days, she was a nuisance.

“I’m very annoying,” she said.

“No, you’re not,” said Molly.

“No, I am. I really am. I’m annoying. I annoy myself, even.”

Molly laughed and hugged her. Joy, hugging her back, felt the sturdy flesh of Molly’s back. “You certainly are strong.”

Molly rolled up her sleeve and made a muscle, like a man. Joy dutifully touched her daughter’s biceps and wondered when it was that muscles on women had become fashionable. “Okay, Popeye,” she said.

Molly was heading out for a walk. She walked very fast and very far every day. Stop and smell the roses, Joy had said once, but Molly said the roses in California did not have much smell.

“I’ll walk you to the gate.” Pretty much all she did. There were no doormen to gossip with, no coffee shop to walk to, no park, no friends to have lunch with, no Karl to bump into. “Just let me find my sunglasses.”

She looked first through one bag, then through another bag. As she pushed the packages of Kleenex and lipsticks and tubes of moisturizer aside, she began to panic. Her sunglasses had to be in her pocketbook, in this brown eyeglass case perhaps, but no, the brown one was empty, and this one, the turquoise, held her reading glasses, the old ones that worked better than the new ones, she had been searching for them all day, and another glasses case, a hard case, white, this had to be the one with the sunglasses, but these were a pair of glasses she had never seen before, where on earth had they come from?

“Here, Mom. I found them. They were in the pocket of your jacket. In the closet.”

“Oh thank god. Now I’ll just put my shoes on.”

Before she could put her shoes on, she had to put on her special elastic stockings that helped her circulation. The special rubber gloves she needed to put on the special stockings were somewhere in the guest room where she slept, which was also Freddie’s home office, poor Freddie. She shuffled into the guest room, fumbled through several drawers until she found the rubber gloves.

“Mom, I don’t have that much time before I have to get to work.” Molly was pacing up and down the hall, all decked out in her sneakers and Lycra. A uniform to take a walk. Joy smiled. Molly had always liked uniforms. She had taken up skating just to get the skates and the silly skirt, horseback riding just to get the breeches and the ratcatcher shirt and the white stock and the shiny black boots; skiing, tennis — she had been very good at sports, but it was all about the equipment.

“You were such a good little tennis player.”

“Mom?”

“Yes, all right, but don’t rush me,” Joy said. “I get flustered.”

“Oh, for god’s sake. Why didn’t you get ready half an hour ago when I said I was going out?”

Joy looked up from her sneaker, the lace of which she was trying to untangle. “See?” she said, beaming. “I was right! I am annoying!”

* * *

Molly and Freddie tried, they did try. They took Joy to the beach to watch the sunset. They took her to dinner. They made her dinner. They walked her up and down the street like a much-loved dog. In the evening they sat outside and had their glass of wine and Joy sat with them, but she was alone in those moments, she was alone in every moment. How could she have explained that to the two girls? That’s how she had come to think of them, as the two girls. Not The Girls. The Girls were her friends back in New York. The Two Girls were here, attentive, dutiful, insufficient.

I have no life, Joy thought. I belong nowhere. I am residing in someone else’s life, in the Two Girls’ life.

The days passed, many days, Joy was sure, though she began to lose track of them.

“Give it a little time, Mom. It’s only been a week,” Molly said.

“It seems like a year. Fish and guests, you know what they say.”

Molly looked crestfallen, a word Joy was sure she had not thought of in years. She could not stand to have her daughter look crestfallen. It broke her heart.

“It’s lovely,” she said quickly. “You two girls are wonderful to me. But what am I doing here, honey? I don’t belong here. I’m in your way and I do have my own home. At home.”

“It’s a change,” Molly said. “A change of scenery.”

Joy tried to smile appreciatively. She must stop complaining or she’d end up with yet another change of scenery, she thought, the parking lot out of a nursing home window.

* * *

That night in bed, Molly whispered to Freddie, “I think she misses him.”

“Of course she does, honey. So do you,” Freddie whispered back. “So do I. It’s been just a few months.”

“No, I mean Karl.”

Freddie started to say that was unlikely, but then wondered. “You think she’s like my father?”

Molly, obviously offended, said, “She’s lonely and vulnerable. That’s all.”

“It’s probably pretty boring for her here.”

Molly had tried to interest her mother in gardening. She offered to get raised beds if Joy wanted to grow vegetables. Molly did not like gardening, but she saw no reason that her mother shouldn’t, and if that meant fresh Tuscan kale and artichokes on Molly’s table, so much the better. “It’s very spiritual, Mom,” she’d said. “Working with the soil.” She wished her mother had shown even a little initiative, if not with vegetables, then with flowers. They had a rosebush out front that was not doing at all well.

“She’s always on the phone,” she whispered to Freddie. “And she’s secretive.”

She thought it was usually Daniel, sometimes Natalie or one of the other girls. But it could be Karl, for all she really knew.

“She probably misses her cronies, her routine. Old people like routine. That’s what they keep telling me at Dad’s place. That’s one of the things they can’t understand about him. He hates routine.”

Molly kissed Freddie. “That’s it! You are a genius. We’ll take her to visit your father. She’ll see her peers and feel less lonely. We’ll take her to Green Goddess!”

* * *

Joy sat glumly in the backseat. The thin end of the wedge. The way they talked this place up, as if it were a resort in the Caribbean — it had happened to her friends, but she had not really expected this from Molly, her own daughter.

“I plan to go back to work in the fall,” she said.

“One day at a time,” Molly answered.

The parking lot seemed to be home to a number of cats.

“Pets are allowed,” Freddie said, “but the cats are feral.”

The building was pink stucco. The rooms had small balconies. In the center of an inner courtyard a fountain bubbled, and there was a front desk like a hotel. The whole place felt like a hotel, actually, a small hotel just a bit down at the heels.

“Not bad, right?” Freddie said.

Joy gave a weak smile.

They had lunch in the dining room. Joy was alarmed by the bibs the residents wore, but the food was quite good. She had never met Freddie’s father before this, which struck all of them as odd.

“Where have they been hiding you?” Duncan asked.

“I live in New York City.” It felt good just to say that: I live in New York.

“What are you doing here with these two harridans?”

“We thought it would be nice for you two to meet, that’s all,” Freddie said.

Joy felt something on her knee. A hand.

“Well, it’s about time, says I,” the owner of the hand said. He gave Joy his handsome smile.

Joy shifted, freeing her knee. “Oh yes.”

A woman at a nearby table was glaring at her. Joy took a bite of her tuna-fish sandwich. The hand returned to her knee. She felt her throat closing and thought, What if I choke and die with my daughter’s father-in-law’s hand on my knee?

“So when did you move into Green Acres?” Duncan said.

“Excuse me?”

“She doesn’t live here, Dad. She’s staying with us.”

“Green Acres? That’s a good one,” Molly said.

“Remember Zsa Zsa Gabor?” Joy said. “Those were the days.”

“That was Eva Gabor.”

“Sweet girl, Zsa Zsa,” said Duncan. “We worked together. Years ago, years ago.”

As Duncan described an obscure movie in which he had an even more obscure part, Joy noticed Freddie raising an eyebrow at Molly. They exchanged just noticeable smirks. Joy kicked Molly under the table, which had the advantage of also dislodging Duncan’s hand.

“A little respect,” Joy said, first to Molly, then to Freddie’s father. “A little respect.”

“Nothing will come of nothing,” said Duncan in his rich and sonorous voice. He tried his smile again.

“Wasn’t that fun, Mom?” Molly asked as they drove home. “Jesus, Freddie, do you actually aim for the potholes?”

Freddie laughed.

Freddie really was good-natured, Joy thought. “Your father is a ball of fire,” she said. She would not mention the hand. What would be the point?

“Never underestimate a minor character actor,” Freddie said. “It’s already been done. Their whole life.”

“Who was that woman who tried to trip us with her walker?” said Molly.

Freddie shrugged. “One of his girlfriends?”

“I’m sure that was an accident,” said Joy. But Green Garden was even more frightening than she had imagined.

* * *

Joy leaned on the grocery cart, weary in body and soul. It was an expensive, trendy grocery store, the kind of grocery store in which half the children were probably not vaccinated against measles. Molly examined a small ugly root vegetable.

“I think you girls deserve some privacy,” Joy said. “You’ve been so hospitable.” She had tried this before but gotten nowhere, and this time, too, Molly smiled an abstracted smile and said, “Don’t worry about it, Mom.”

Joy pushed the cart to the fish counter and waited for Molly to catch up. She missed her apartment, her lonely apartment in which she could roam and mourn at will. She missed the doormen. She missed her friends. She missed the park and Karl.

“I’m homesick, Molly. I keep trying to tell you nicely. I want to go home.”

“I understand that you’re not completely adjusted—”

“Adjusted? No, I’m not adjusted. I don’t want to be adjusted.” Joy realized she was speaking loudly and the mothers of unvaccinated children were glancing at her suspiciously. Careful, Joy. Don’t rile up the natives, don’t rile up Molly, especially. “Sweetheart, you and Freddie have been absolutely wonderful, but put yourself in my position.”

“That’s just what I was talking to Daniel about, and we decided that even more than the change in scenery, even more than the warm weather, that what you need is to be useful.”

“Yes,” said Joy, suddenly jubilant. At last her son and daughter understood.

“Everyone needs to be useful.”

“That is so true.” She would go back to work and insist on getting her projects back. She would call Norman, that fellow on the board, the one who Aaron used to play poker with, why hadn’t she thought of it before …

“We thought you could do something at the Getty, maybe.”

“The Getty?”

“Yeah, you know, like volunteer. Or the Skirball. The training for docents is pretty rigorous, but still…”

Molly prattled away about Los Angeles museums and their volunteer programs as they loaded the cart with healthful food that Joy could not digest. Joy searched the shelves for Cream of Wheat and said, now and then in hopeless punctuation of Molly’s recitation, “Such good ideas! If only I did not already have a museum. In New York.”

One evening when Molly was at a meeting and not coming home until late, Joy and Freddie went out to dinner, just the two of them. It was the first time they had done anything like that, and they were both a little nervous, Joy’s discomfort manifesting itself in silence, Freddie’s in chatter.

“Molly doesn’t like this place, she thinks it’s boring, but I love it and I think you might like it, too. The traffic will be impossible on the 10, even in this direction, so I think I’ll take Venice, oh my god, look at them trying to get to the 405…”

Joy opened the window and let the cool air in. It smelled like flowers even on this busy street. She braced herself for yet another restaurant with painfully loud music, painfully hard benches, women in painfully high heels and men comfortable in sneakers, all of them eating spicy, fishy fragments of raw things on little saucers. It was the same in New York, she supposed, but she never went to restaurants like that in New York. She was in the mood for spaghetti and meatballs.

It seemed like a long time before they finally pulled into a parking structure, then spiraled down several levels until they found a space. Disoriented, Joy squeezed out of the car and followed Freddie to an elevator that took them back to street level. Freddie was still talking. Something about her department at the university trying to screw someone over in a fourth-year review and a committee that never met. Joy thought of the museum, of Miss Georgia, of all the orphaned artifacts she could no longer tend to. She was grateful to Freddie for talking, for trying. Freddie was a good sport. Joy remembered being a good sport. It required energy and optimism and faith, and it had been quite rewarding. Really, she had spent her entire life being a good sport. But to what end? She had grown old and uncomfortable, just like a bad sport. And now she was a bad sport. There was no protection in good behavior. She felt suddenly compassionate toward Freddie, struggling on in a unilateral conversation that would not protect her from the disappointments of old age.

“You’re a good sport, Freddie,” she said.

Freddie’s face lit up, that tan, weathered face, into an almost goofy smile. How charming, that large unconscious grin. Freddie’s was not a beautiful, womanly face by any stretch of the imagination, more a wary, taut look to her, but when she smiled, the contrast was overwhelmingly pleasant. It made Joy grin back at her. It was like a happy slap on the back, that smile, an arm thrown joyfully around your shoulder. It was as friendly a smile as Joy could remember seeing. It was irresistible. No wonder Molly fell in love with this person. Joy marveled that she had never noticed the warmth of that smile, of everything about Freddie, really. Then she realized she had never really looked at Freddie’s face before. It had been an indistinct oval, an unwelcome blur from the dreaded California.

“This is very nice of you,” Joy said.

They walked a quarter of a block, then turned into a small strip mall. There was a sushi restaurant, a Korean barbecue, a nail salon, and an Italian restaurant. Freddie opened the door of the Italian restaurant.

“It’s so quiet,” Joy said.

“It’s so comfortable,” she added, sliding into a padded booth.

“Spaghetti and meatballs,” she told the waiter happily. “Just what I wanted.”

“This place has been here forever,” Freddie said. “My father used to take us when I was a kid. I bring him back once in a while, but he doesn’t remember it, so it’s kind of sad.”

Joy reached across the table for Freddie’s hand. “It’s awful when they don’t remember what you remember, even when you’re right there with them. It’s like nothing exists anymore.”

Freddie was crying, just a few tears. Joy had never seen her cry. She was such an odd little thing, ebullient and tough all at once. Poignant tears, not like me, Joy thought, with my weeping and wailing every minute. Not like Molly, either.

“No one really understands this particular abyss,” Joy said. “Our abyss.”

“No, they don’t. But why should they, I suppose.”

“We’re an exclusive club.”

“The Abyss Club,” Freddie said, laughing. She took her hand back, wiped her eyes with the big cloth napkin.

They had ricotta cheesecake and cannolis for dessert.

“I’ll pay for it later,” Joy said. “So I always say. But it never stops me.”

* * *

Molly and Freddie disappeared the next morning and came home with a very small dog.

“You can walk it,” they said.

“Step on it is more likely.”

“Listen, it’s perfect: Freddie and I went to the pound and rescued this little fellow. Now we have a dog, right?”

“Apparently.”

“But we both have jobs, right?”

“Thank god. I don’t care what the ‘experts’ report about the economy, people are suffering, that’s all I can say.”

“We have a dog, but because of our jobs we don’t have time to walk the dog. So, Freddie and I really need you, Mom. We need you to walk our dog.”

“It would be a big help to us,” Freddie said. She smiled, and Joy of course smiled back and took the new plaid leash attached to the tiny dog.

They were such nice girls, and she appreciated the thought and effort that had gone into the plan. It was creative of the girls, she had to give them that. And she was touched that they cared enough about her mental health to go to such lengths to give her something to do. It was not their fault that the dog refused to cooperate.

The dog was named Gatto, which was amusing. But Gatto did not like to take walks. Gatto hated to take walks. The size of a large rat, he was part Chihuahua, part poodle, part parrot, Joy thought, for he was a very vocal little dog, making his wishes known with a remarkably varied vocabulary of squeaks and yelps, and his wishes were to stay home, curled on Joy’s lap.

“Gatto, indeed,” she said. Gatto squeaked, snorted, stretched, and balled himself up again. Joy patted his head, the size of a nectarine, and dozed uncomfortably. She was afraid to move. She did not want to disturb him.

* * *

The days went by, blue skies and pretty smells. She carried Gatto with her on her strolls, mostly as a way of starting conversations. She was uneasy talking to the girls, noticing their impatience, how they interrupted with unnecessarily big smiles to change the subject. Was she talking too much? Had she become boring? She supposed she was and she had. She became more and more quiet at home. But on her walks all kinds of people stopped her to admire the dog. They laughed when she told them his name.

“My daughter got him for me so I could take him on walks, but he doesn’t like to walk,” she would say, and they would laugh again.

Aaron, she thought, you would not like it here. There’s no normal place to get coffee, no normal barber, just an overpriced coffee place where people sit on uncomfortable, oversized wooden boxes, just hair salons for skinny young men. You would not like it here, but you are gone. She sometimes thought he was there beside her, shaking his head at the young people riding bicycles, no helmets, carrying surfboards under one arm.

“Where are all the old people?” she asked.

“It’s gotten sort of gentrified,” said Freddie. “A lot of tech companies moved in.”

“But where are the old people?”

Molly shrugged. “Assisted living?”

Joy did not ask again.

* * *

Because Gatto did not like to walk and Joy had gotten so much stronger, Molly and Freddie revised their plans for Joy to be useful. They got her a tricycle.

“It’s red,” she said. She did not know what else to say. What is there to say when presented with an adult tricycle? It had a basket for Gatto. It had an old-fashioned bell. It was gigantic. It was a tricycle. It was red.

“You can ride on the boardwalk. It’s great exercise.”

“You can do errands,” Freddie added. “Which are so…”

“Useful!”

Molly often finished Freddie’s sentences, and vice versa.

“Useful.” Joy wanted to be useful. She wanted that almost as much as she did not want to be lonely. But was a tricycle really the road to relevance? Were errands the answer? And she would look like a kook.

“Wear a hat for the sun, Mom.”

A kook in a hat.

“We got you a water bottle,” Freddie said.

* * *

Joy had ridden just such a red tricycle when she was a child. It was not dignified then. It was not dignified now.

“I know they mean well,” she said to Natalie one morning when both girls were off at work and she could speak freely on the phone.

“Don’t you know how to ride a two-wheeler?”

“Of course I do. They wanted me to ride it to the grocery store to get milk yesterday.”

“I thought you were lactose-intolerant.”

“I am, but I don’t want to hurt their feelings. But luckily, I had a terrible bout of diarrhea and couldn’t go. At least it’s flat here. But they really are making an effort, they’re trying.”

“Trying to what? Turn their mother into an errand boy?”

“They think I’ll feel useful, that they’ve given meaning to my life.”

“Ridiculous. Just ridiculous. Don’t they have a car?”

“I just realized something. People will think I lost my license.”

“They’ll think you’re a drunk, an old, eccentric drunk with a DUI.”

They laughed at that.

“Okay,” Natalie said. “Time to come home.”

* * *

Joy poked through the bookcase looking for something to read. Molly and Freddie did not get a newspaper. They read it online. What difference did it make, her eyes were terrible anyway. She could read a little if the light was right and she tilted her head and the print was dark. She picked up an old New York magazine from a pile in a basket. Interesting that Molly still got New York magazine. She must miss New York. Joy caught her breath. Perhaps that meant she would move back. She could get an apartment nearby. They could see each other for lunch. And dinner.

She spent some time searching for her striped bag, then searched through it for her sunglasses. Maybe they were in the green bag. The dog followed her wherever she went. She wondered if he would follow her outside, if it was the leash that made him refuse to go on a walk.

“That way you could get a little exercise, fatso,” she said. He really was getting tubby, and so quickly, too. Molly said it was not healthy for him to be so heavy, that Joy should stop feeding him bits of her own food. “We’ll show her,” Joy said. “You deserve every bit of food you can get after the life you lived, whatever it was.” She imagined him on the street, fighting with the crows for pizza crusts.

She put on her sunglasses, got her cane, opened the door, and called Gatto. He made some inquiring noises, then slunk to the door on his belly. Joy went out and down the steps to the street. She called him again. “Come here, come here, Gatto. Cardiovascular activity! Come on!” He looked at her dubiously, then darted out the door and stood beside her. “Good boy.” Now she walked down the street, stopping periodically so he could catch up. He lay down on her feet after each of these sprints, but they made it all the way down the block before Joy turned around to go back.

And then, from nowhere, a giant of a dog galloped around the corner, gave a deep thunderous growl, a deeper more thunderous bark, and Gatto was hanging from the beast’s jaws like a rag toy.

Probably she hit the dog with her cane. That would account for the owner pushing her out of the way and screaming. Unless the screaming was Joy’s, which it may well have been. She grabbed the animal’s jaws and tried to pry them apart, that she was sure of. She was sure she ultimately shoved her cane in its mouth and yanked down until Gatto flopped out onto the ground and the beast’s owner dragged it away by its collar.

Joy carried Gatto into the house. He was alive. His heart was beating, fluttering like hummingbird wings. There was blood on his belly. Joy wrapped him in a towel and put him in the basket of the tricycle. She pushed open the back gate and pedaled as furiously as an eighty-six-year-old can pedal a tricycle. There was a main thoroughfare one block away, a street with stores and malls and an animal hospital. She pedaled and pedaled and crossed the street against the light and heard cars honking and screamed an obscenity and pedaled some more until she saw the vet’s office and pulled the tricycle onto the sidewalk.

Gatto was stitched up and given some shots. The vet was a young woman with freckles sprinkled across her nose who treated him like a VIP, Joy thought. A VIP, she said to Gatto as she pedaled him home. That’s what you are, a VIP.

When Molly came home, she found her mother in bed, Gatto beside her, shaved and stitched, both of them fast asleep. The gate to the alley had been left open, and when she went to close it, she noticed the tricycle, in its basket a bloody towel.

“This is a dangerous city,” Joy said when she woke up. “I’m taking Gatto home where it’s safe.”