“But with Nonna,” I started to speak.
“With Nonna you could have whatever you wanted.”
“A respectable life,” I said.
“Arlette there to make your bed for you. For money and the comforts money buys you lived with your grandmother, and now look at what we missed.”
There were times I would have missed. The night she threw herself over the hood of his car — who was it? — to keep him from leaving. I reminded her. I knew enough to make her cry.
And she knew enough to make me cry, but she didn’t, and she never mentioned Walter, my own, unmet. She never reminded me of all he broke. She could guess at what I remembered; Mother had had a terrible Walter, too.
“I really don’t like to fly” was what Mother said as if I had asked, “Will you visit?” She said, “It didn’t have to be this way.” She said, “My mother. My mother, my mother, my mother was behind it,” and then she cried, and I was satisfied but embarrassed and went to get us new drinks. No one visited; my mother mostly slept. “What time is it?” she asked every time she waked.
Nearly one in the afternoon, nearly two.
“I was thinking,” she would start.
“What?” I asked. “Thinking what?”
“Of, of, of.”
Oh, I was tired of finishing Mother’s sentences.
It was time to go home now.
But I came back another summer to California and stayed until the books I had brought and intended to read stuck to what they were pressed to, and the stationery curled, and the stamps dampened, and the addresses in my book looked to have been written long ago by a much more serious, constricted person. The person I was here in California was always touching herself with dreamy half purpose, touching herself absently in front of other people — once, the man come to wash the carpet, in sight of him, I fretted and held my hand over, and I walked too soon on the carpet and left behind prints.
And shoes? I rarely wore them in the California summers at my mother’s house, one of a complex, where she lived, a condominium complex beehived in the canyon. Neighbors only glimpsed; the condo staff sucking up leaves or vacuuming the pools, otherwise a terrifying quiet here. Only visiting children and small nippy dogs walked on glittery leashes by women who did not speak English.
“Hola!” Mother called to Bertita and gestured. She pointed to the sheets, the cabinets, the paper products. “Mas?” Mother asked, her nails ticking shelves nearly empty except for cat food. At least the house was well supplied with cat food.
But lonely women and shedding cats turned joke-depressing, and it was time to go home.
“Already?” Mother asked.
“Sadly, yes,” I said, excited.
Home then to the city I went and not to the site of our losses, not to where my father and Nonna were buried, but to a brownstone block, landmarked and ginkgoed, old trees — very pretty. Old trees, old city. New York, New York. Teaching was what I did for money. “I want to be a poet,” was what I confided to no one.
“School starts in two weeks, Mother. I really have to go.”
The woman in California who said she was my mother had how many cats? They were not run over; the coyotes in the canyon ate them, or that was what she said when I came back the next summer and found new kitties. Found new friends, too, while the friends from before were less friendly. Their greetings sounded more like a question. “Alice?” they said, as if, like me, they weren’t sure of Mother’s identity. From summer to summer this mother changed. Her shoulders narrowed, and the weight in her arms dropped. She was growing crooked and used to her bed. It was hard for her to walk. Her hips were replaced; and then, the next summer, the doctors were at her spine.
The doctors took out and put in.
She talked of bolts and special metals and her hip socket growing cold. She said, “When I drink, I don’t feel it — the awful pain.” She asked, “Do I clank?” She asked, “Am I okay?”
“Better,” I said.
“Let me see,” she said. “Did you ever hear of blend?”
My thumb on her lids, I tried to blend; but I could not make her what she was, and what we both thought she had been a long time ago — beautiful, beautiful.
This woman, who said she was my mother, was not beautiful.
This woman said, “I give up,” and then she drank. She liked grape drink and vodka mixed. She liked such food as made her retch and in this way was similar to the mother from before, the same who had said, “Think I care?” then used a razor on her wrist — too lightly but to bloody effect.
“Didn’t they teach you this in college?” she asked, steadying herself against the bathroom sink, wiping at her mouth. “A friend of mine told me that in college anorexics rot the plumbing.” She looked hard at me then. “All that acid,” she said.
“I should go home now,” I said.
“Why?” she asked. “We’re just having fun,” and she smoothed a part of the bed for me to lie on. She said, “Come here, I’ll scratch your back.”
The skin on my back was not yet loosening, and it was easy to be naked before her and lulled by her distracted scratching. We were watching TV, and the TV picture was growing larger, the set giving off heat. Even the show we watched, it seemed, was louder. But outside was quiet and closing in. The sky had clouded up; the sun surely had set, though we could not see the ocean. Soon it would be dark. Her touch grew repetitive and faint when the only light in the room was the fluttering light on TV.
“Shush, no talking.”
“Was I talking?” she asked and fell back to sleep.
Like me, she had to sleep near a glass of water.
Also, I noticed, our feet were alike — cracked heels and bunched toes. Nothing anyone would want to be in bed with, and a sign, I thought, those overlooked feet, that no one had kept company for a long time.
Mother fell into a sleep from which she yet kept speaking.
“What do you want?” I asked. She didn’t answer clearly but played with her lips.
“I should go home now,” I said.
At home, and witness to a clearer change of season, I saw my hair grow in — largely, darkly. Outside the foliage tendrilled, and the bees frenzied the playgrounds’ sweet refuse — apple cores and squeezed cartons of juice. The market stands were full of polished gourds and knotted ears of garnet corn. The ginkgos yellowed; the backyard gardens browned — blow-weed and thistle, late summer’s drift, and the swimsuits I had worn on the California beaches were packed away now, salt-dried. I was growing in. I was making lists and using the phone. I was letting people know I was home again and that the area rug, summer-stored and cleaned, could be delivered, the boxed blankets, newly banded, would soon be needed; I was home again and preparing for the record colds, for the short unlit days and suspending snows, for the frayed, iced wires, the shut-downs, the winds, the space heaters, the fires, the tireless coverage of the ravaging winter that is winter in the city.
The urge to loll in a warm place is the same wherever I go.
WEST SEVENTY-SIX
THE PALPABLE IMPERMANENCE OF the warm weather place we paid to get to — and never won in a raffle — Barbados, the Caribbean, all salt-white, wet, and chafing sand. It caught in the legs of my suit and burned. The terrible Walter, my own (more terrible than Mother’s), bobbed, ridiculous as cork, in the foamy surf; he floated on his back as he might have sat at home. His white feet stuck out, and he wore his silly hat. Surly, threatening man, Walter was yet intent on being happy; but with his mouth open, he gagged on the water that washed over his head, and he draggled himself to shore. Blear, sore face, water rivering off his arms and legs — he was a disappointed traveler ready to go home.