“May you be so lucky!” Mother had said and said to me. “May you never suffer like this!”
Now she hardly spoke. She could have been Nonna.
I show Mother her brother’s handwriting; I unfold the recipe he sent. The formula to Fivey’s milk punch: 3 quarts of milk, 1 pint of rye or blended whiskey, 3 ounces of dark rum, 7 ounces of brandy, 12 teaspoons of sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract; stir rapidly while mixing to keep the milk from curdling.
When I ask, “Do you remember milk punch?” Mother cries.
Tickets to the desert — I had accepted them from Uncle Billy; only now there was no message from him, no letter from Madeira, no comfortable inheritance to live on — and Mother was dying in a nursing home, expensively and slowly. Mother was hardly moving — straws in all the glasses, Kleenex, pills — the body’s litter, skinflakes large enough to be identified, flew in a dust when the nurse beat her pillows. How many times had I been to the Birdcage? I sat in a small chair near to her bed and said, “I think it’s nice here, Mother, don’t you?” and she made as if to speak and then she didn’t.
Mother was clearly, definitely, finally dying; and I had helped her to it, asking all those summers, “Can I get you more to drink?”
Returned, at school, I write on the board:
“‘I had not the qualities or talents to make my way very well in the world; I should have been continually at fault.’”
Identifications. Give the significance of. The instructions are always the same: “Look at the clock occasionally to see how much time you have left.”
FATHER
HIS BOOKPLATED BOOKS SHOW my father had affection for bullying poets — hairy, bearish, mad. The poet found naked on the road with arms outspread declaiming Milton and stopping cars, this poet’s books, in hardcover and paperback, and his collected prose and a biography and books of criticism take up an entire shelf. But what did my father think about?
I once knew what my mother thought about; she thought about expensive things and ownership, uselessness, loss. She had talked about the dead and was not afraid of dying because she believed she would join them — her mother and father, and those great-greats unmet. Whenever Mother spoke of her dead — and she once spoke of them often — I saw drifts of sheer hankies brushing against each other and so talking. Mother then had no plans for her body.
“You pick a place, Alice, scatter me. That will be fine,” she had said, “that will be sufficient.”
But I was talking about my father. My father is buried far from the church he attended in the years that he was married. Six. The years seem not so many now. Six years married. Twenty-five years now dead. Dead at thirty-seven, of an accident, a car accident (they said), drowning. A morning storm caught so many cars on their way to work, they said.
“Besides,” they said, “he was a bad driver.”
They said, “Read the papers from the time. His name is there.”
A mean rain runneled over blinded cars stalled along the highway on the day my father died. Spring. He took the old road that ran along the lake and somehow — was it slick or fog? — slipped off the road and onto the lake where the rain-pocked ice gave way on a breath and down went the car and its driver. Minutes was all it took. Eight, nine, ten, my guess. Ten, my age, when age began to matter, and Mother’s terrible Walter said, “You look good enough to eat,” and he licked his lips at me and farted. But my father—
Sometimes it is not the lake but a river that feeds into the lake that drowns him. There is no briefcase in the river, no falling through peated water. “When my father drowns in the river, he is naked. The water carries his body fast.
My father has no body. No spittled lips, no smells. Fished out of the lake or out of the river, my father is washed featureless, sodden and dark I have to fight the impulse to kick him. “You!” I frown — a girl, disgusted—“Why is it always you I am thinking of!”
(My head is on fire like this sometimes.)
THE DREAM
HE SAYS WHAT THEY all say, “We tried. It didn’t work.”
He says, “I think I’m only good for the money.”
I grip the briefcase between my legs so that when he pulls, as he is forced to pull, the handle hurts me, but I don’t cry. I say, “Daddy, please,” and I watch him turn away.
My head hurts, and I am running after in my nightgown on the lawn. I’ll do myself damage.
“I will!” I insist, knowing as I do that the use of a knife on a calloused place doesn’t hurt so much, and there is blood enough to scare. “Look!” I stand on one foot with a knife in my hand, shouting after him, “I’ll do it!” But he pays me no attention; he starts the car. He says, “I’ve seen that trick before.”
“You want more?” I ask and make to use the knife on my hand, even though he isn’t looking at me. He is headed in the other direction away from where we live, Mother and I, both of us cut up and calling, “Don’t leave!” We are very dramatic.
One time Mother was on the bed, arms out, legs spread as one fallen back on snow, an angel-maker distracted by the task — cracked lips, eyes closed.
“Mother,” I asked, already dialing. “Come quick,” I told Arthur. “We’re in trouble.”
Arthur got down on his knees and let me ride his back.
He made her Florida.
It was cold where we lived; I was most often thirsty.
MOTHER
SITTING ASKEW IN HER wheelchair, Mother spoke to me of me. She said, “That Alice! She never visits!” Her voice, when she said this, was full of malice and glee. She looked mad. She said her hair was heavy on her head. “I can see as well as anyone,” Mother said. “I know who you think you are. …”
I acted surprised and delighted when really I was afraid.
So many dead — Father, Arthur, Nonna — soon, I thought, there will be no one to remember us.
I sometimes said Uncle Billy’s name on purpose and watched Mother grow frantic until she scared me, and I ran from her room calling, “Nurse!”
I didn’t know a single nurse by name. I did not often visit.
“Any luggage?” they asked at the Gingerbread Inn.
“How long have you been gone from here? How long have you been away?”
And what’s it to you? I wanted to say. I am not despairing by the roadside. I have more than gloves to sell if I should run out of money. See these pearls around my neck? I kept them after all. But I could sell them if I had to. “Who would ever know what Nonna had promised Mother, then given to me, was gone?
So much gone. Uncle Billy had sold his house and Nonna’s house and moved to the desert.
ANY HOUSE
“I CAN LIVE ANYWHERE easily — have done.” My boast, but I believe it. I am resilient. “Small but wiry” was what Mother used to say, and I am. Arthur would be proud. And Mr. Early, too, writing to me at the end, “I just want you to keep on going pretty much the way you are.”
I miss the touching ways of men.
I miss my mother the way I think I will when she is dead.
TUCSON
“WE NEVER THOUGHT YOU’D come!” they say, these bent, wish-boned people, my Uncle Billy, my Aunt Frances.
Their new man says, “Howdy-do from all of us.” He tells me Uncle Billy has a new project, a new wall, the start of a third terrace. They have their voices, my Uncle Billy and my Aunt Frances. They can see, they can walk, they can reason — the problem is breath, breathing, oxygen. Air! Tucson helps. Already a rope-thick vine, a cactus with inch-long, lion-like prickers, jags up the new wall. The desiccated landscape with its menacing cactus is exquisitely, adamantly alive, though it looks dead.