“We could always use more money,” Mother said.
To the terrible Walters, to all of the boyfriends, we had both of us said, “We could use it!”
“You can always find things to sell,” Mother counseled.
“I have,” I told her, but I didn’t always confess what of hers I had sold. No, I didn’t want to tell her what I owed the dead man Walter, and I tried not to use any names that might hurt her. The woman, the one who said she had always been my mother no matter how far away she had lived, was sicker every summer, it was clear — more and more time, she spent in bed. I began to confuse her with Norma.
“Mother?” I asked, standing near to where she slept.
Little governess, light as cinder in a black stuff dress, she is tenacious of life and wants vision and practical experience and wider company. In another century she would not marry but would write. Jane would write — not Mr. R. Mr. Rochester is only confessionally garrulous, but Jane, Jane Eyre is a talker of such succinct or impassioned, memorable speech as in, how to avoid the burning pit of hell? “I must keep in good health, and not die.”
My mother was once a talker. She named us all — cars and children. Then one summer she began to stammer. Living indoors in California, sleeping through the afternoon, she woke making thick and broken utterance. She could start a sentence but found it hard to finish. The next summer — worse — she couldn’t begin. She had to be prodded.
“Mother? Mother? What do you want?”
Then, when she was dumb in this way, I was cruel. I told it to her face: I gave her a fuller inventory than ever I had before of what of hers was gone. Why did I tell her except that I did. The handkerchief table, the silver tea service. And California — when I looked up from the packing list, I saw that California, too, was disappearing. The soiled carpet underfoot was dank, and only the cats got fed. We ate stale chips for dinner.
“Who’s driving to Vons for salsa?” I asked, but we stayed at home and went out less and less.
I said, “I’m nearly almost always broke myself.”
Mother asserted, “We’re in for it now, believe me. …”
One summer we stayed whole days indoors and watched the light move frantically between the slats of the shuttered windows. I lay in bed and wondered what had happened to Mother’s wand. Her bedside drawer — I had looked — was empty. I thought about buying gel for myself, but more and more, like Mother, I slept. I slept until she woke and called out, “Look …”
Nothing, junk — but we watched it. I got in bed with Mother and watched in the dark. Later, staring at me — me going downstairs for water — she said, “Why don’t you take better care?”
Another time she said, “I’m sorry you’re lonely.”
But something about her voice, the way she spoke, made me think she wasn’t sorry at all, and I hated her, and I said, “I wish getting old didn’t mean growing ugly.”
We had this in common: The men we had loved, and even some of those we hadn’t, all were dead.
“All this to have happened already, and you’re so young!” she said to me. “Really.”
In California, I closed off, avoided, walked past rooms, living mostly in the bedroom and talking about what I would do if only I had money. I would travel!
Mother said, “Oh … have one of your funny cigarettes.”
Mother scratching my back felt good, too, then, and sometimes Mother would go on scratching until her hand made a jerked motion, and she began to snore — most times lightly.
I let the TV flicker. I killed the sound. I rolled something small to sleep by.
WEST SEVENTY-SIX
“WHAT DO YOU THINK,” is Dr. O’s answer.
I think if I could only stay awake and concentrate on a soothing hobby all would be well.
SHORT IDENTIFICATIONS
I WAS HOPING FOR the discovery of a rich uncle from Madeira.
I was waiting for the will to be read.
The years clacked past: Father, Nonna, Arthur, Mr. Early, and Walter, of course — the terrible Walter! my own, too full of toxins, still terrible — dead. The Walter-years, those years … made me sleepy, and the lawyer’s secretary brought me water because I could not stay awake.
His lawyer asked, “Is this your signature,” and I had to say it was, which meant I owed — for damages, for something — I had signed in front of Walter.
His lawyer said, “You can pay back slowly.”
“But the months go by so fast!”
The yellow fall was almost past, and I was thirty.
I thought of hurtful people. My head was on fire with thinking of them, and I had to remind myself, in the most deliberate way, to think of the kind and forgiving. Mr. Early, Mr. Early, Mr. Early, a teacher in college who went by his initials RWD, another teacher, an absentminded—but brilliant! — woman not to be trusted, and yet I loved her, too. She came to Thursday classes in a pleated skirt, silk, bowtied blouse, pearls; more than once I saw her face was half made-up, one eye scant of mascara. She was off-kilter in such ways. She was a tipsy mischief-maker at the end of the table, a quickly spilled voice, a gossip — dangerous! I wanted her for a mother when she had her best friends already — all famous — yet she said, “If you ever need help …” Did she mean I could ask?
“Yes,” says the lawyer and he hands me a pen.
I can pay — I will pay — if I’ve done the math right it will take me five years. Not so bad.
Stringent and inviolate are words the students should learn; and some lines I ask to be read aloud, or I read them, “‘Believe in heaven. Hope to meet again there.’ What does this say about Jane’s character?” I ask. The students make exasperated faces. Most of them get mad at her or don’t care what she does, if only she would get to it. Make a life in the brisk climes, honest and alone, or travel with your lover undercover in warm places, but in less than forty pages, please! “Yes, yes, yes,” I agree, “and why resist the sea and the comfort of his villa?”
MOTHER
I WAS THE CHIEF — our only—subject after Mother was moved from assisted living, from elevators, meals, activities, pets to the Birdcage, her name. The last home before the last. The Birdcage, as she once called it, the Nursing Home. Home! The word was obscene when attached to the swabbed, two-story, flung-out building with its enormous, linoleum sunroom. There, mid-morning, the half dead were parked in their chairs, and I found Mother asleep.
The nurses said go ahead, go outside, the malls down the road. “She’s best in the late afternoon.”
Awake, Mother made fists and swung stiffly and helplessly at the nurses, saying she could walk, saying Arthur would pick her up, she didn’t belong here, this wasn’t her watch.
“Could you sign this, Mother?” I asked and held out bank business I didn’t understand. I thought of my own damages; I thought to myself — don’t sign! But Mother did.
The handwriting was thin, unfinished: Moth. “Your real name, Mother!” I shouted. “Write that.” But Mother was become the shivery moth of her signature, the bald, breastless mother of the stories she once loved, the ones that told of women wide-open in pursuit. Their shrouds wisped, and the women howled; they traveled with potions and spells.