Mother, I remember, in the Rapunzel shirt. Late May and the breeze made the garden blowzy — this way, that way — enthusiastic, and I could see straight-ahead to the pleasure of July, to the cut-grass green days of dewy midsummer. My mother could see it, too, days of it, from where we were sitting on the stoop together, she ruffled up in the Rapunzel shirt and the breeze that was blowing along Main, Lawn, School, White — our streets in the leafy splatter of late May noon light. I was happy, and it seemed to me that Mother was happy, too, in a purely quiet way — no talking.
Even when her company promised no pleasure, I went looking for my mother. She was, as often, looking for whichever man was making up her life. My mother made up a tramp’s sack of the silver and shouldered it to carry to a lover as a gift. I saw her leaving, and later, on the lawn, I stood where she might have stood, and I called after her.
“Remember my shoes?” Mother asked me when she had stopped crying and Aunt Frances had left the room on that one and only visit to the San. “My shoes in the yard with the leaves?”
I saw shoes, narrow and balletic and made in a material that stained. Strapped ankles, stubbed toes — from dancing? I wondered. Such shoes as these the terrible Walter caught up in a rake as easily as leaves and burned.
Nothing then, nothing held its shape but blew away.
II
THE BIG HOUSE
THE TRANSACTIONS I WITNESSED at the other end of the lake from Uncle Billy’s, I didn’t tell Aunt Frances — or anyone — I kept them to myself. At the other end of the lake from Uncle Billy’s was Nonna’s big house, the one she was wheeled in, sent up and down in by the Otis with the spring gate — me in the Big House finally, my favorite house with the elevator I could drive! I was thirteen — at last! — and left to wander. Three floors, eleven bathrooms, and bedrooms, bedrooms, bedrooms; the sunroom was all window, shelved in marble, a color green as of weeds or of weedy, shallow water streaked darker in places with amphibious nesting. The sunroom overlooked the lake; plants grew all over the windows, greedy cut-leaf light-lovers. But it was not warm in the sunroom, the sunroom was like Uncle Billy’s house and cold. Nonna’s parrot Polly was singing in her cage. “I like ice cream, we all like” and Miss O’Boyle, miss nurse, was feeding the bird ice cream to make Nonna smile. Miss O’Boyle said, “Nonna looks happy,” but I thought Nonna only smiled to feel how cool the ice cream was against her long, split lips, how sweet. Miss O’Boyle said, “Next time you see them, you tell your Aunt Frances and Uncle Billy your nonna is just fine.”
I did. I said, “Nonna has never looked better,” but I did not tell anyone about Nonna eating off the same spoon as the parrot and soundlessly laughing. I didn’t want anyone in trouble if what I did with my grandmother was wrong, was in-grown like old Nonna herself, was overfull of intimacies of the sort I had known with Mother. “I’m in the tub,” Mother saying, “come and talk to me”—this easy we had been, and I knew Nonna’s body just as well. Mornings I saw the folds of skin that was her back when Miss O’Boyle hefted Nonna into a tub and washed her.
Miss O’Boyle told me, “You make it easy for Nonna when you are talking. Keep talking.”
I talked about Walter, who had followed my father and exhausted us so! So that, yes, I was glad, yes, relieved to be away from Mother and living in the Big House with Nonna. “Mother gave a lot away,” I told Nonna. The bulldog clock, the malachite eggs, the Christmas spoons and lusterware. Also clothes, clothes, clothes — some of them mine. These betrayals of my mother shamed me but not enough to keep quiet. I wanted to sleep on Nonna’s ironed sheets and eat rare chops with mint jelly. I told Nonna, “I never want to live with Mother again.”
Miss O’Boyle gave me Nonna’s hand to hold, so that I might kneel at the tub and speak close, “Thank you, Nonna. I promise I won’t lose it,” I said, but I was really like my mother and careless.
Nonna’s eyes blinked understanding, but mostly she looked straight ahead and grew light in our arms in the water and floated, a small, grandmotherly, sleeping-sored body. “See those bruises?” Miss O’Boyle said. “She needs to be turned, and at night, you could do it. You could help,” Miss O’Boyle said. “Nonna’d like that,” and Miss O’Boyle smiled stiffly at Nonna. “You like Alice to take care of you, don’t you,” she shouted.
But I didn’t take care, or at least not that I could remember did I help Nonna very much. I often slept in the other bed; the best I could do was be company, but Aunt Frances on the phone said, “You’re a big girl, now, Alice. You could help the nurses with Nonna.” I talked instead; I sat with Nonna in the sunroom and talked and talked. I twiddled the desk gifts, a crystal paperweight with the company’s insignia, a letter-opener and a magnifying glass, printed envelopes and stationery, and all of it from the company’s president, long dead but still alive, Nonna’s husband. (Just look in the foyer at the cane collection, the paintings of naked women.) The bench was his in the walk-in closet, where Miss O’Boyle dressed Nonna, and I made as if to help, wondering, did Nonna feel the pinch of it, her husband dead, when so much else hurt? Her back brace, her brassiere. I did help sometimes; I heard the intake of breath when we hooked her.
Him, him: Was it her husband she was thinking about when we strapped her in?
I lifted Nonna’s heavy foot to the footrest on the wheelchair and wrapped the heel loop, which sometimes cut, with toweling.
Again and again, Miss O’Boyle had found blood on clothes, yet Nonna would wear them, the day-suits that hurt. She got red in the face whenever Miss O’Boyle tucked a tasseled throw over her legs.
Head shaking No! against it, Nonna wanted to be dressed in the dresses she had always worn — in long, knit suits, faux-belted.
Please! Twisted Nonna’s face when Miss O’Boyle was readying Nonna for the morning. She wanted to be dressed for breakfast! She wanted raspberries fresh, like I was having, not mush. But Miss O’Boyle lifted Nonna’s hand from the egg cup and spoon-fed the patient boiled egg. “No one listens to me,” was what I saw Nonna saying. Using what parts of her body still moved — her eyes, her eyes especially, which were big and swarmy even without her glasses — she used her eyes to speak; she put out her trembling hands, saying No! to the bed jacket, No! But Miss O’Boyle insisted. She insisted on the sun in the late afternoon, and she wheeled Nonna in it to warm her battered legs.
The sun, I thought, shone through her, through Nonna’s hair, her nose, her hands. And in the glassy sweep of windows were birds. And, too, the flurry of her open desk — no matter not much used. Here was life! Correspondence cards, hatches full of envelopes, a folded sheet of stamps. The pencils I found were sharp, and there was lots of paper to draw on. Greasy lead, heat, the nearby TVs noise, and Miss O’Boyle saying Really! To it, not sounding surprised. Nonna was snoring softly. Soon the cook would bring us cookies, then dinner, then Polly the parrot and Nonna were spoon-fed dessert.
I didn’t tell anyone how I liked these afternoons, these nights.
Something else I never told Aunt Frances or Uncle Billy, how outside the Big House, down the hill of stone steps to the boat-house where the boats hung by chains under canvas drapery, near to where the pier was piled up and also covered against the snow, at the lookout of the prickly cedars, I saw, I saw a car fall through the ice. I saw the ice crack and steeple. I saw the back of the car sink “Help! help!” I was calling despite no one near enough to hear me. The ice was thunking open and taking the car down fast, talking: small sounds from the car, the ice sounding, awe, awe. I made my own noises moving backward, hand to my heart, heel in old snow. I was afraid to run.