“Look what he’s done,” Aunt Frances says: walls, awnings, raised beds, gardens. The lap pool’s blue-black tiles color the water such a blue I want to dive in — immediately! And the water, I am sure, must be warm. I know the way they live. I know the room they will give me at the other end of the house will be far enough away for me to talk to myself. There I can blow smoke out of the skylights or crawl along the floor to smell the rosewatery smell of Aunt Frances. “Mi casa es su casa”—pliant pillows, tender beds, blocks of blue shadow to rest in, blocks of white sun.
A girl once, I used to grind against the paths, prospecting in the high-season. High-season: one of the reasons I am here, the other has to do with Mother.
I am the daughter, the namesake, over twenty-one. Do the nurses phone me first? Must I be the one to say no, to look at the accountings, to oversee the dribble? (Last month, her front tooth cracked off. At first I told the nurses no, we will leave Mother as she is, but later I said yes, take her to the dentists. Whatever is the best he can do, he should do it.)
“I don’t want this job much longer,” I say, addressing Uncle Billy, but Aunt Frances speaks for them both.
“We’re too old, Alice,” she says. “Uncle Billy has trouble breathing.”
In the house of complete collections was there ever any room for children?
Aunt Frances says, “We have our money, it is true. Lots of money. Nevertheless, I balance my checkbook, don’t you?”
“I have decided on a long time between visits,” I say, talking at dinner about Mother and how it is with her all day in a wheelchair. She worries over the way the nurses have dressed her. She pulls at her windbreaker when it bubbles in the wind, pulls and smoothes with her trembling, twisted-up hands. Leisure pants, thin tennis shoes — her footwear need not be substantiaclass="underline" She does not walk. She sits after breakfast in her chair in the sun. She lists in her chair, and her toes point downward. Her feet dangle and point downward with a little girl’s insouciance, and she scratches her unshaven ankles with her feet. From a distance, she is a little girl, but close up she is scaly, uneven, coarse and brown. The brown has to do with her mouth — and not the vague discolorations on her cheeks — but her mouth. Tobacco-colored spit stains the corners of her mouth. I am describing Mother parked in the sun after breakfast, growing sleepy yet fully dressed and expectant of someone else. “I know who you think you are, who you think,” Mother says when I step from behind the nurse repeating, “It’s me, Mother, Alice. Alice, remember? Your daughter?”
She says, “My daughter is pretty.”
“My mother, too.”
She says, “I know who you …” She is disappointed. I think she does not like what she sees — and why should she? She pushes her dessert away and rocks in her chair. She looks very old, but Mother is the youngest at her table. Mother is the youngest woman at a table of women, all many years older, two deranged, one spastic, and they eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. Every day at this table, and yet Mother cannot keep up with the oldest of them, who snipes at her whenever she plays the baby. I should have been an actress was what Mother used to say. The fork shakes in her hand — too heavy. She lets it drop, and then the oldest shrills at the nurses, “Don’t feed her. She’s not a baby. She can feed herself.”
“Can you, Alice?” the nurse asks Mother. (Only the nurses know everyone’s name.) “Do you need a little help, Alice? You like dessert. You know you like dessert. But maybe it’s your daughter’s here. She’s here, isn’t she. And you’re excited. You’re too excited to eat, aren’t you, Alice. Alice,” the nurses say, “this is your daughter, Alice. This is Alice, isn’t this?”
Mother says to me, “I know who you are …,” and I think she does not like what she sees. I think she thinks my face is a pail full of worms, and Mother knows. She knows about beauty. She knows about death, too, only now she seems afraid of it.
Uncle Billy says he doesn’t want to hear anymore! He is waving his hands at me, saying, “That’s my baby sister you’re talking about.”
Uncle Billy says, “Come on. Before dessert, I want to show you something. I want you to see a new project.”
His canister of air clanks over the stone patio. “You must have noticed,” he says, “a lot has changed.”
“Yes.”
“Over there, the cactus garden.”
“Yes, yes.” Something newly made or found around every corner. Uncle Billy has taken his ease and enjoyed his money, his money and his wife’s money, the piles of it. The ha-ha bets with his also-rich friends—“A hundred dollars says I can.” Often he won, but how much did it cost, I wonder, to haul a lake for whatever was lost from a dead man’s car. “It’s there,” Uncle Billy had insisted, drawn on by the corsair’s adventure of finding the jewel case with all of Mother’s trinkets, but why would the jewel case be in father’s car? Mystery! Searches and constructions and destructions with powerful machinery and smeary men for Uncle Billy to boss: This was his business. What days tracking pleasure! I went along on the smaller excursions, to the Winter Boat Show and Oktoberfest and once to Little Poland. There we stopped at the Legion Hall just to jumble through the jumble sale, to see what merrymaking people were after. Uncle Billy bought me a netted bag of marbles, all color of cat’s eyes and crystals — emeralds, diamonds, sapphires, rubies. Another time at the Falls, at a yard sale, we were walking through a dead lady’s house. Arthur found a tool kit and Uncle Billy bought it. He bought a box of two-inch nails — never opened, never used — and a bread knife he thought Arlette might like. Uncle Billy had a care for everyone. Arthur was given a household tool kit, and Aunt Frances, a thousand-piece puzzle. He gave himself the nails. “And scissors. Good scissors. You can never have too many of these, Alice. Pick a pair.” When Uncle Billy looked at me in this way and talked directly and cheerfully about our life, I was happy, and I wanted to walk the yard sale again, but he changed direction. His sudden, wandering attention made him turn away in a loose, goofy, goose-stepping way that yet wasn’t funny to me, that seemed cruel to me. How could he lose interest in what we were doing together, but he did and was speaking to himself. “I’ve got a plan,” he was saying when I had caught up near the car, and we were off again, Arthur driving. Uncle Billy with his lurched way of showing he was happy, his sudden, “Let’s take a trip!” Wild Billy, Uncle Billy was looking at me, asking then, “Are you enjoying yourself, Alice?” Uncle Billy was bouncing in his seat, fussing with the power window — up-down, up-down — until he got it right. Right enough or large enough, first on the lake to put in his boat, first to hang it from the boathouse ceiling. Wrapped in canvas, girdled, strung up with chains like a winch-lifted animal, the boat I once spied through the boathouse windows wasn’t used very much, even in summer.
When did Uncle Billy sell the boat, I wonder, and what is in the boathouse now? Who lives in Uncle Billy’s house, and how have they changed it?
That house. I never thought the last time I saw the house would be the last. The felt-lined, felt-protected feel of the house, how softly every light switch went on. More than the collections themselves — the seashells, arrowheads, bullets from the desert — the underlit glass cases of Uncle Billy’s collections, the very glass itself, sobered me. I walked past with my arms crossed to quell the urge to kiss it, the glass, to feel it warm against my lips and see my lips’ wrinkly impress.