They May Not Mean To, But They Do

40

The sadness was there, waiting for her in the apartment. I’m sorry, Joy said to the sadness. I’m sorry I had to leave you behind for so long. But, believe me, the blue skies never fooled me, you were in my thoughts, in my heart, every minute. She looked out the window at the rain and the wet trees and the bleary spots of red taillights and white headlights. I’m home, she said, with relief, to the emptiness.

She sat at the kitchen table and Gatto leaped onto her lap, his nails scratching her leg. He was a good traveler. He hadn’t made a peep, zipped up in his bag beneath the seat. She had forgotten he was there, had almost left him behind, abandoned a dog that had already been abandoned, it would have been terrible, and she wondered who would have found him, a flight attendant or one of the cleaning crew, perhaps, and whether they would have taken him home and given him a good life.

“But I didn’t abandon you,” she said aloud. She petted his hard little head and wondered why she felt abandoned. No one had left her behind under an airline seat, it was she who had insisted on leaving California and Molly, but it had taken only a moment for the abandonment to rise up, like a cold flame; it had taken only the sight of Molly turning her back after she got her settled in her JetBlue wheelchair.

Joy pulled the dog up to her face, letting his warmth muffle the silence. “But we didn’t belong there, did we?”

Gatto jumped down and lifted his leg against the leg of the table.

Joy watched him blandly. “You think you can scare me with a little pee? Think again, dog. I’ve been worked over by an expert. With a colostomy bag.”

She wiped up the dog pee. She mourned her husband. She mourned her life, which seemed so far away, lost in time. She longed for her daughter and her son, the sounds of their voices, the strength of their arms, and the loving condescension of their hearts. She longed for Aaron.

She didn’t seem to belong anywhere anymore. But it was good to be home just the same.

* * *

“Promise you’ll call me every day and tell me how you’re doing,” Molly had said before Joy left.

Joy took her promise to heart. She called every day, eagerly, hesitant to disturb Molly, but not hesitant enough to stop dialing. Sometimes she called twice a day, sometimes more. It was dangerous to call so much, signaling need and helplessness, she knew that. She made sure to sound happy and engaged, made sure to share only what bits of information she believed shed a pleasant light on her and her days. The deliveryman from the coffee shop looked cold, she told Molly, so she gave him one of Aaron’s scarves, he was so grateful.

“Mom, it’s June. How could he be?”

“The point, Molly, is how nice it is to be able to make a gesture like that and have it mean something to someone.”

“Which scarf? I hope not the gray cashmere.”

Joy tried to monitor her voice and conversation, to weed out any petulance and grievance of tone, but it was difficult. No matter how hard she listened to herself and monitored herself, what she heard was an indolent, wide-ranging, rolling report of the minutiae of a disgruntled old woman’s existence: the chronology of meals, of courses within meals, the digestive consequences of meals; the frequency of sleep and sleeplessness, the details of other phone calls, phone calls with people Molly did not even know. She couldn’t change the course of her words, they rushed along like a flooded river. She talked about her grandchildren and their bad colds, but also the grandchildren of friends and neighbors with colds that were even worse. Those grandchildren, the grandchildren of friends and neighbors, had cousins, too, whose troubles and triumphs she found herself confiding to Molly. Her voice droned on and she was mesmerized by it, helpless to stop, unwilling to hang up. Not that long ago she had been lying on Molly and Freddie’s couch watching television, her daughter giving her a foot massage, and Joy had been longing to be alone with her loneliness. Now she experienced every phone call to Molly as essential, something she could not let slip away.

“I take the dog out every day.”

“Yes, you told me, that’s great for you, to get out.”

“I still have to carry him. It’s good he only weighs a few pounds. I’m not as strong as I once was. But yesterday it was so windy the doorman, that nice Ernie who Daddy liked so much, he wouldn’t let me out the door. I called the hardware store, Feldman’s, the one with all the tchotchkes, and they suggested Wee-Wee pads, but I had to call a pet store to get them. My neighbor upstairs, the man who was always such a sourpuss until he got his poodle, well, he gave me a number, left it with the doorman, actually, and I called…”

“Mom? I’m sorry, but I’m in the middle of cooking dinner. I really should get off the phone.”

“Oh! The time difference. And why am I rattling on like this? It’s a mild form of senility. Good night, sweetheart.”

“I wish Mom would get hearing aids,” Daniel told Molly after one of his own conversations with their mother.

But Molly didn’t think it would make much difference. Their mother wanted to talk, not to listen. It was an exhalation of words, no intake of breath, no pauses, a stream of consciousness into which no one else could dip a toe, an incompleteness so complete there could be no natural end to a conversation. Molly often found these monologues strangely soothing. She wondered if that was what meditation was all about, that absence of meaning, that sense of eternity. She was almost as helpless in that cocoon of superfluous information as her mother. The truth was, she craved the sound of her mother’s voice. It calmed her, reassured her. Ah yes, the twins’ First Communion. Whose twins? she would wonder idly. But it didn’t matter. They were the twins created by her mother’s voice, created by her mother.

There was little chance for Molly to interrupt, and she stopped trying. She did not say, for example, I miss Daddy at the oddest times. She missed him whenever the fog came in. He used to quote Carl Sandburg when there was fog, little cat feet, silent haunches. She missed him when she made gravy because he hated giblets, or when she made lima beans because he hated lima beans, or pea soup because he loved pea soup. She missed him when she got an ingrown toenail and cut a V in the nail the way he’d taught her. She rarely had a chance to say any of that to her mother, and the few times she tried, she felt intrusive and loud. She didn’t say much and she didn’t listen carefully. Her mother’s voice washed over her, intoxicating.

“Until I can’t stand it anymore.”

“Well, an hour on the phone is a lot,” Freddie said sympathetically.

“It’s no skin off your nose,” Molly said. “Why do you care?”

Freddie shook her head and laughed. “You’re impossible.”

“A hundred years ago we would have had to write letters, which would have taken days to get across the country. And I would not have heard her voice. I love her voice. I love to hear it. Until I can’t stand it anymore! And then I hang up, and then I miss her and want to listen to her talk more.”

Freddie tried to remember her own mother’s voice. She could feel it, in her thoughts and in her body, high and fluty, but she couldn’t hear it. That night she dreamed about her mother: her mother had been alive all this time, Freddie was surprised and overjoyed to see her, to hold her hand and kiss her and cry with relief.

* * *

“The apartment is a shambles,” Daniel told his wife. “And there are Wee-Wee pads all over. And my mother is in her pajamas and bathrobe. She never goes out. It’s like she’s become a recluse in two weeks. The dog is a fat pig.”

Coco asked cautiously if he wanted Joy to stay with them.

“Oh, I don’t think we’re there yet.”

“She’s so independent,” she said, with obvious relief.

“And California was not exactly a success.”

“But we would be less intrusive,” Coco said. “We would let her go her own way. Your sister and Freddie, well…”

“They can be a little…”

“Overbearing.”

Daniel laughed. He sat next to Coco on the couch and put his arm around her.

“But I hate to think of her in that big old apartment all by herself,” Coco said.

“Big? Not for her. She’s covered every surface with papers and clothes. She needs more rooms to clutter. Anyway, she’s not alone. She’s got the obese dog.”

He tried to imagine his mother in their loft. They would have to box her in, the way they had the kids. But the kids’ little box rooms had the only windows in the back. They could always give Joy a windowless closet, the way the museum did. He remembered the younger Joy, funny and full of eccentric energy. The first day of moving in, she would have had the whole family out bird-watching or making rubbings of manhole covers. Now, though, she spent most of her time shuffling through her apartment looking for her glasses, the dog shuffling after her, or making toast on which she slathered something yellow and glistening that was not butter.

“Oh god, Coco, why are we even thinking about this?” But he was grateful she had brought it up. He wondered what she would have done if he’d said, Yes, that’s a splendid idea, let’s move her in as soon as we can.

“But, Daniel, we’re so lucky to have Cora and Ruby around, I feel almost selfish. They would make things so much more cheerful for your mother.”

Daniel could not argue with that. Both he and Coco considered their children an indisputable addition to any situation. They were always surprised when the girls were not included in wedding invitations or cocktail parties. Again, Daniel tried to picture his mother in the loft. It’s so drafty, she would say. The lighting is so harsh. He knew she would say those things because she had already said them when they once had Thanksgiving there. I just feel uncomfortable, in my head, the proportions are off, Danny, but at least they fixed your elevator. “Maybe we could just lend the children to her.”

Coco said nothing. She was thinking of her own old age. Would Cora or Ruby want her to come and live with them when the time came? She would have to set a good example. “We could make her feel much more at home than Freddie and Molly did.”

Daniel suspected her generosity of spirit was propped up just a bit by her certainty that he would not agree. Even though his mother had been so good to him all his life, especially when he’d been sick, coming to the hospital every day before and after work. In so many ways, Daniel had modeled himself on her, trying to do good, to be generous, to repay the world with some of the care she had shown him. Maybe, it occurred to him, he should be repaying her, not the planet. Maybe Coco was right and they should share their lives with her the way she had devoted so much of her life to him.

The girls came running into the living room at that moment and demanded ice cream.

“You girls could share a room if Grandma came to live with us,” Coco said.

Share? Horror-stricken faces. Pushing. Kicking. Squeals of aggression, squeals of pain.

“Go to your rooms this minute!”

“Yeah, and stay out of my room, too,” Cora said to her sister, delivering one last blow.

“Stay out of my room first,” said Ruby.

“I’m already out of your room. I win.”

Daniel shepherded them into their rooms and shut their doors.

When he came back with two glasses of Scotch, Coco took hers gratefully and said, “I guess that won’t work, sharing a room.”

“No.”

She determined then and there always to have two extra bedrooms when she was old, one for each of her daughters to move into.