“Hi, Reina.” That’s what she called her, for years. “How ya doin’?”
“Well, I’m doin’,” said Reina. “I am definitely doin’.”
A not-too-far-off neighbor’s voice cried, “Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama!”—battle cry of dementia and defeat.
Dusty kept the ball in the air for the usual amiable volley of nonsense: how long Reina had been sitting versus lying down, how beautiful her hair was, the beautiful weather, had she been to the beautiful beach, did the piano man play her favorite Bacharachs. A nurse brought Dusty’s special tea (kept on reserve) then two more appeared and they all had a jovial visit in the queen’s wing of the broken-memory palace.
When they left, Dusty sunnily asked, “Do you know who I am?” Reina looked askance, brow knit in disgust. “Tell me my name.”
“Why should I?”
“Oh come on, Mom.” The Mom just came out — she’d process that later, with Ginevra. Interesting. “What’s my name? You can tell me.”
“I’m supposed to do everything you say?”
“You’ve never done anything I’ve asked you to!” She had to laugh. “I’m Dusty, your daughter.”
“Want to give me your autograph? Asshole?”
Scalded, she backed off and took a few yoga breaths before starting over.
“How are you, Reina?”
“Oh, just fine,” said her mother, with blank kindliness. She was somewhere else now but Dusty wondered how much of it was an act. “I do a lot of dancing.”
“Really?” she asked, humoring. “When? When do you dance? When do they have dances?”
“Every night, Josephine!”
“Wow. Really. Okay.”
“You know that,” said Reina, scowling.
“Cha-cha? Fox-trot? Do you fox-trot?”
“Well, I don’t trot. I’m not a horse. Last time I looked.”
The old woman smiled, bits of green food in her teeth. Dusty wanted to shove stalks of frozen broccoli down her throat until she choked — to flood her lungs with saltwater and organic juices till they ruptured.
“What about tango? Do you tango? Do you samba?”
“They don’t allow that.”
“Illegal, huh.”
She was running out of things to say. She had come with a mission but everything was getting sweaty and fuzzy now.
“Have you eaten yet? Did you have lunch?”
“They don’t serve lunch till six-thirty.”
“They don’t serve lunch till dinnertime?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I’m not sure if that’s the case, but okay. Maybe they do it differently here.”
“I’m glad you approve.”
They sat in silence. Her mother said, “So how’s Big Movie Star?”
“Big Movie Star’s great!” said Dusty, with bullshit bravado. “Makin’ shitloads of money.” Announcing her worth was her most toxic venom.
“And how’s the little tramp?”
She didn’t see that coming and contorted under the knife.
“She’s not a little tramp and her name is Allegra. She’s my wife and she’s effin’ fantastic.”
“She’s stealing from you.”
“I don’t think so, Reina.”
“Why else would she be with you?”
“Good question!”
“She wants your money.”
“She can have it, she can have all of it! In fact, I’ve already given her millions!”
For all her bluster, she may as well have been a crippled woman being chased down a dark field by a rapist with superpowers. Reina guffawed and wet-farted. “She’s cheating and stealing from you because you’re old, old, old. Look at your skin. The young do not love the old!”
Dusty walked from the room and out of the building. She moved listlessly toward the car and stopped. No: she would go back in — had to. She’d do what she promised herself then never return.
The twins on the couch were gone and so was the pianist.
An orderly in a hairnet had just brought a lunch tray and Reina was snarling that she wasn’t hungry. Dusty was surprised when her mother asked her for help. A happy-faced R.N. came in and Dusty told her that Mom would eat later, they were going to visit awhile longer, it was all good. The nurse said of course, then, with comic flourish, reassured that “Your mother eats… whenever she wants to!”
“I’m sure she does,” said Dusty.
The nurse said, “No one’s on a timetable here.”
Everyone left.
Dusty steeled herself.
“Mother,” she said studiously. “I wanted to ask about Aurora.”
There it was: the euphemism shot by a fainthearted cannoneer. Ginevra told her to expect nothing, which was understood. Therapist and client agreed to call it an exercise—just asking the question was an important step in healing. Dusty had even psyched herself up the night before by performing a visual meditation, linking this final errand to the closing of the lid of Reina’s coffin.
“Can you tell me what happened to her? Years ago you told me she was adopted by a ‘nice family’—Daddy told me that too. But you never… we never really talked about it. Ever! Why? Why didn’t we?” The old woman remained quiet and expressionless. “But we can now. Can you tell me anything? About the details? Mother, is there anything you can remember?”
The trickster genius of wet brain lay in its oracular unpredictability; Dusty’s arrows might elicit cyclopean rage, the flinch of nonresponse, or essential truths. Hope rose hard, like a hundred shuttlecocks in her chest.
“I’d like to know if you ever met them, that’s all. The people who adopted Aurora.”
“Oh, just forget it.”
Reina put on her warty Brueghel peasant face — not a harbinger of good things.
“Forget it? I basically had to! I basically had to arrange my entire life around forgetting it — so don’t tell me to forget it!”
“It’s a movie,” said the crone, with malignant calm. “It’s just a movie.”
“Didn’t you ever want a granddaughter?” said Dusty, changing tack. “Didn’t you ever miss not having a granddaughter?”
“Like a hole in the head.”
“Because I know we had enough money…”
“We had money, not you.”
Dusty was crumbling. “Daddy wanted — I know Daddy wanted a granddaughter—”
“Oh, is that right. And who said so? And don’t tell me he did, ’cause he didn’t.”
“I know he wanted one!” She heard her voice become little girly and the eeriness of it frightened her. “I know he wanted me to have her…”
“You know, you know, you know! I am not going through this with you again!”
“What do you mean again? We have never gone through this!”
“Oh yes we have—”
“In your mind, maybe! You wanted to get rid of it! You forced me to because you didn’t want to be… encumbered.” Reina was actually laughing now. “You wanted to be free as a bird”—Dusty hated the antiquey phrase she’d inherited from her bitch mother—“so you could go out and do your fucking or whatever it was you were doing—”