They May Not Mean To, But They Do

49

For the last decade, ever since Aaron had begun to fade, Joy had hired a car to drive them and their stuff to the house Upstate for the summer, always the same car and driver, an aging Vietnam vet from the town nearest their house. The car, a resplendent used limousine he had gotten from a national limo service when it was a mere six years old, was close to twenty now. The driver, Mr. Bailey, was in his seventies.

“I hope you don’t mind that I brought Mother,” he said, nodding toward a small white-haired head just showing above the passenger seat. The ancient limousine rocked and swayed. The two heads swung back and forth, rhythmic and synchronized. “But she likes an outing, don’t you, Mother?”

Mother did not answer.

“Very thoughtful of you,” Joy said. She glared at her children, one on either side of her, both giggling like infants. Daniel hummed the Psycho shower music under his breath. In the enormous well of the car were a pile of black garbage bags, like so many lumpy corpses — Joy’s luggage.

“Thank you for taking the dog,” Joy said.

“Oh, we love dogs, don’t we, Mother?”

The traffic was heavy. Where were they all going? Why couldn’t they stay home and tend to their business? “This is a disaster, darling,” she said to the dog.

Daniel looked at the trees, so green and full. “Traffic or no traffic, the house will still be there.”

“You’re too complacent, Danny.”

“I wonder if anyone can be too complacent. Complacent seems like a good thing to be, Mom. Maybe you’re not complacent enough.”

“Don’t you start with the Prozac. I am not taking any of your pills.”

“I didn’t say anything about Prozac.”

“Well, your sister did.”

“No, I didn’t. Not today.”

“I know it’s what you’re both thinking. But forget it. I’m in mourning.”

“So am I,” Daniel said.

His mother said, “Oh, sweetie, of course you are,” and gave him a package of peanut-butter crackers.

Daniel wished he could wear a crepe hatband, he wished wearing black meant something these days, meant mourning instead of fashion. His father’s death had taken some layer of earth out from beneath his feet. He thought of his father more than he ever had when Aaron was alive. He thought of him when he shaved, remembering watching his father shave the two patches above the beard on each cheek, the neck beneath the beard. Daniel had never wanted a beard, never liked his father’s fussy attention to its shape and fullness. Now, all of a sudden, he thought about growing one. He thought of his father when he ate. Dad liked bratwurst, he would think. Dad loved smoked whitefish. Dad hated beets. And yogurt. He thought of his father whenever he paid his credit card bills, too. Daniel always paid them on time, the full amount. Dad ran up huge debt, he would think. And along with the anger that had plagued him for so many years, he would think, Poor Dad, poor Dad, always in debt. Daniel had a strong, easy-to-access financial plan. What would Dad do? he would think, and then he would do the opposite. He was not rich, but he was not gambling his family’s life away on one lousy business venture after another. But poor Dad, now that poor Dad was dead. His father had always been hopeful, cheerful, sure his next venture would make him a fortune. There was strength in that, he supposed, and he missed his father’s strength.

Joy began to rummage in a shopping bag. She extracted aluminum foil packages. “Want one, anyone?” she asked, pulling the foil off a hard-boiled egg. The smell of hard-boiled eggs filled the rocking car.

“No,” Molly said, turning away quickly.

“Protein,” Joy said. “Yummy protein.” She pinched a piece off for Gatto.

Daniel shoved the rest of the egg, whole, into his mouth.

“Is it okay if I open the window?” Molly asked.

“It’s very noisy,” said Joy. “And with the dog…”

“Just for a minute. I feel kind of sick.”

“You should eat something,” Joy said. She unwrapped another egg.

* * *

“Oh, how your father loved this house,” Joy said as they pulled in the driveway.

“No, he didn’t,” Daniel said.

“Yes, he did,” said Molly.

Molly stepped out of the car and took in the familiar trees, the warm summer light, the clean white clouds against the rich blue of the sky. She had been going Upstate every summer since she was born. Her mother had spent summers there before that when she was a child. How many people could say that? How many families were that lucky? It was a wonderful house, a family house, full of family memories and full of family every summer. Molly felt the ground beneath her feet, felt it hold her weight, felt its solid, gentle welcome.

Her mother’s little dog flew out of the limousine and began to sniff the ground.

“He’s happy,” Joy said.

Molly sniffed the air, light with honeysuckle and privet.

The house had a front porch, which was already piled with stuff. Coco and the girls had come earlier, the car packed to the roof with toys, all toys and electronics, as far as Joy could tell. She got out of the car with some difficulty, she got so stiff these days, and walked up the flagstone path to the house. She put her hand on the doorknob and waited to be as happy as the dog. A breeze blew. The smell was there, that mixture of humid earth and humid air, of wet bark and grass. She could hear the children calling to each other, her children, but of course they were Danny’s children, her children were no longer children. She opened the door to the slight sting of mildew. The dog rushed past her, brushing against her legs, a butterfly of a dog. He was wet, he was fast, he was gone. She held the doorjamb to steady herself. The girls ran past her. Hi, Grandma, they called. They did not stop. They were gone.

“Mom?”

Joy opened her eyes. She hadn’t realized they were closed.

“Mom, sorry, I just have to squeeze in here…” Molly pressed against her, trying to get inside. “Mom, come on…”

“Okay, okay, sorry.”

Molly darted past her to the bathroom.

Coco had already unloaded most of the contents of the station wagon: the bicycles and scooters, the computers and Wii console, the electric piano, the stuffed animals, the toy wheelbarrow, and the puppet stage. The volume of child equipment was incomprehensible to Joy. She remembered Daniel’s and Molly’s toy box when they were growing up. It was yellowy unfinished wood with a top that crashed down on their fingers if they were not quick enough. It was a good size, or so they all thought at the time, the size of a small steamer trunk. What was in it? A truck, some blocks, a doll, a robot, a stuffed monkey, toy pistols and holsters, boxing gloves, a cowboy hat, maybe. She looked at the mound of possessions on the porch of the house.

“Is this really all yours? All that stuff?”

Danny gave her a look, a warning look, as he dragged her black garbage bags into the house.

“Matching luggage,” Joy said to the girls.

They barely acknowledged her. “Gatto! Gatto!” they cried, running out the door, this time followed by the clatter of the dog. They ran in circles around the maple tree, then the girls rolled down the hill, getting themselves dizzy, the dog chasing after them. Joy remembered doing that. Now she got dizzy without any rolling.

“Goodbye!” she called to Mr. Bailey as he backed out of the driveway. “Goodbye, Mother!”

Joy wondered what she had packed in all those bags. They looked so anonymous and lumpy. Each July, she would take the bloated garbage bags to the house, and each September she would drag them back, most of them undisturbed since their arrival.

“Upstate is perfect,” she said, running her hand along the back of the sagging sofa. “It never changes.”

“Everything changes,” Danny began in his environmental voice.

Please don’t start with climate change, Joy thought. She felt as if the house had taken her hand and said, Welcome home. “Welcome home,” she said. “That doesn’t change.”

She sat on the porch swing and listened to the stream that ran behind the house. Sunlight floated through the maple leaves above. The sounds of decades of summers surrounded her — the robins, the peepers.

She wondered what her life would have been like if she’d married Karl instead of Aaron. She probably would never have had the career she’d had. It would not have been necessary. That would have been a loss. On the other hand, there would have been enough money for them to survive without her scrabbling for work. What a luxury, not to worry about money. She wondered if anyone really had that luxury.

“I’ll miss you,” she had said to Karl before leaving. She touched his old hand with her old hand. And when she’d said it, she didn’t realize how true it was. She missed him already. She could see his earnest eyes, his face opening up into a smile. She could feel his close-shaved cheek as she gave him a kiss goodbye. His cheek was soft, old, but it was new, too, unfamiliar, exciting. Maybe his poor dead wife was right, maybe it was better to let sleeping dogs, dead dogs, lie. It was enough to lose Aaron, to miss Aaron. She didn’t need to miss Karl, too. She was too old. She was too tired.

And now at least she was not alone. She was surrounded by the ones she loved. Although they made so much noise. Coco was already banging pots and pans around. Daniel was bumping suitcases up the stairs. The girls were screaming, and Molly was somehow talking to Freddie on the computer she’d brought with her.

But this was the place Joy knew best. She had grown up in the city and lived her entire adult life in the city, but this was where she belonged. The air was her air, as if it had been made for her, air that revived her and soothed her. The light was her light, changing in ways she knew and anticipated and loved. There was nowhere on earth in which she felt more at home. Even the sounds seemed to welcome her, to know her, to greet her. There had been rain and the stream was high and rushed noisily by. A finch sang its chortling musical song. She listened for the cows from the pasture across the road. She heard something low and rumbling, not cows. A tractor plowing a far-off field.

But it was not a tractor, and it was not far off. The sudden crash of rocks reached her, the beeping of heavy machinery backing up, muffled shouts, a jackhammer.

“What are they doing, Grandma?” Cora asked. She climbed onto the roof of the car and looked across the street. “They’re digging up rocks with a steam shovel.”

Gatto jumped into Joy’s arms.

Molly stormed out of the house. “What the hell is going on?” she said, and stomped down the hill, yelling, “Hey! Hey!”

“Well, we’re not building this swimming pool for the cows,” the foreman said cheerfully when they had all followed Molly to the field.

Joy heard herself say with what she knew was irrelevant conviction, “I am a widow.”

The foreman was named Bill. He reached over to pet Gatto and Joy felt the growl building in the dog’s chest, but to her disappointment it quickly shifted into a friendly whimper and he licked the foreman’s hand.

“How long will you be doing this?” Molly said.

“And what exactly are you doing?” Daniel asked.

“Well, let’s see, building a road, of course, and houses. Nine. So yeah, we’ll be here awhile, I guess. Beautiful houses, pretty high-end. Pools, too. Hey, little puppy, what’s your name?”

There was an unpleasant discussion that night. Daniel said, “With this development going up, someone might actually want to buy our house.”

“This is my ancestral home,” Joy said. “And yours.”

He explained again that Joy was running out of money. “Anyway, our ancestors lived in shtetls.”

Molly told him he was morbid. Joy said perhaps she would die and solve everyone’s money worries. All of this had to be conducted in whispers, because the girls were asleep.

“Let it go,” Coco said to Daniel in bed that night. “Give your mother a summer off.”

“I’m just trying to be responsible.”

“Let it go.”

* * *

“Where’s Aunt Freddie, anyway?” Cora asked at breakfast.

Aunt Freddie always slipped her a crisp dollar bill when she saw her.

“You’re a miser,” Ruby said.

“I’m not.”

“It means you love money.”

“Oh. Then I am. So what?”

“Why do you love money?” Joy asked.

“I collect it.”

Joy nodded. Better than fingernail clippings. Molly had collected fingernail clippings.

Molly grabbed Cora and kissed her. She was touched that Cora thought to ask where Freddie was. Sometimes she wondered if any of them remembered Freddie existed when Freddie wasn’t standing directly in front of them. Particularly Joy. Since Molly’s divorce, her life had become less and less real to her mother. Molly knew her mother was proud of her, knew Joy liked Freddie, but she knew also that she existed in a different way for her mother now, that the new reality was perceived dimly, as if the lights had gone out when she got divorced and her mother had never turned them back on. Molly plus a husband plus a child to raise had made sense to Joy. That was a discernible unit, that family of three. But Molly and Freddie in California? That was not a unit. It was an absence.

“I wish Aunt Freddie were here,” she said to Cora.

“Yeah, why isn’t she?”

“Good question. Why isn’t she?” Daniel asked, as if this were the first moment he’d noticed her absence.

“Daniel, she’s with her father,” Coco said. “All her sisters and brothers are coming to L.A., remember?”

“That Freddie is a fine, fine person,” said Joy.

Molly looked at her in surprise.

“I could see that when I stayed with you. A fine person.”

Molly smiled, a grin really. “Thank you, Mommy.”

“Why are you thanking me?” Joy asked fondly. “I didn’t say you were a fine person. You’re lucky Freddie puts up with you.”