“He was the photographer’s friend,” she said. “He was having a big day in the city, and the suit was part of his friend’s lie.”
I knew not to ask, “What lie, Mom?” Because that took her to a bad place where her marriage was just the long, arduous playing out of an afternoon con between schoolboy friends. Instead I asked, “Who was the shoot for?”
“The original John Wanamaker’s,” she said. Her face glowed like an old-fashioned streetlamp lit from the inside. Everything else in the room disappeared as if into a dark fog. I did not realize then that there was no place in these memories for the company of a child.
As my mother drifted into the past, where she was happiest, I appointed myself the past’s faithful guardian. If her feet looked cold, I covered them. If the light left the room too dark, I quietly crept over and turned on a bookshelf lamp that would cast only a small circle of light-not too big-just enough to keep her voice from becoming a scary shapeless echo in the dark. Outside, in the street in front of our house, the workmen who had been hired to install the stained-glass windows in the new Greek Orthodox church-green because for some reason this color of glass was cheaper than most-might walk by and make a noise too loud to ignore. When this happened, I would meet the drowsy blank stare that came over my mother with ushering words meant to slip her back to the dream-past.
“Five girls showed up, not eight,” I’d say.
Or “His last name, Knightly, was irresistible.”
When I look back, I think how silly I must have sounded, parroting the phrases of my mother’s lovesick girlhood, but what was most precious about our house back then was that no matter how wrongheaded everything might be, inside it, we could distill ourselves to being a normal man, woman, and child. No one had to see my father put on an apron and do overtime work after he got home, or watch me cajole my mother, trying to get her to eat.
“I didn’t know he wasn’t in the fashion industry until after he’d kissed me,” she’d say.
“But what about the kiss?”
It was always here that she teetered. The kiss and the weeks immediately following it must have been wonderful, but she could not forgive my father once he’d brought her to Phoenixville.
“ New York City,” she’d say, looking down dejectedly between her splayed feet on the floor. “I never even got there.”
It was my mother’s disappointments that were enumerated in our household and that I saw before me every day as if they were posted on our fridge-a static list that my presence could not assuage.
I must have petted my mother’s head for a long time. Eventually I saw the blue light of a television go on across the street. When my parents had first moved to Phoenixville, this neighborhood had been a thriving one, full of young families. Now the squat 1940s houses on quarter-acre lots were often rented out to couples down on their luck. My mother said you could tell who the renters were because they let the houses rot, but in my mind it was these very people that kept the street from turning into a place where the isolated elderly were slowly dying.
As darkness descended, so did the cold. I looked down at the length of my mother’s body, wrapped in double blankets, and knew she would never feel the uncertainties that come with the fluctuation of air or light again.
“Over now,” I said to her. “It’s over.”
And for the first time, the air was empty around me. For the first time, it was not full of hatchets and blame or unworthiness-as-oxygen.
As I breathed in this blank-space world-where my mother ended at the border of her own flesh-I heard the phone ring in the kitchen. I slipped off the back of the porch and walked back past the latticework. On the next-door neighbor’s empty porch, I could see the local tomcat grooming himself. Growing up, Sarah called such cats “orange marmalades.” I saw the old metal lid cocked at an angle on top of the neighbor’s neatly tucked and rolled paper trash bag and made a mental note to take my mother’s trash out. My whole life, she would instruct me about the proper way to fold a bag. “Paper bags, wax bags, are like your sheets. Hospital corners improve them.”
The phone rang again and again. I walked up the three wooden steps to the door. My mother’s feet extended out over the top stair. She had insisted that the answering machines I brought her did not work. “She’s afraid of them,” Natalie said. “My father thinks the ATM will eat his arm.”
I smelled something as I shoved my mother’s body just far enough aside to squeeze back into the house. It was the smell of lighter fluid and charcoal mingling in the air. By this time the ring of the phone was a hammer pounding from inside my skull, or a voice calling me from outside a nightmare.
The first thing I saw when I entered the kitchen was the step-stool chair beneath the wall-mounted phone. The red vinyl was cracked and taped thirty-five years ago, more than a decade after it served as my first high chair. Seeing it in the kitchen was like seeing a lion left standing, ignored. It leaped out at me, roaring with the voice of the phone above it, propelling me back to my father placing me there. I saw the slash of my young father’s smile and my mother’s wobbly wrist bringing peaches and bananas-all pureed by hand-up to my lips. How hard she had tried and how she must have hated it from the start.
I grabbed the phone as if it were a life raft.
“Hello?”
“Do you need help?”
The voice was old, feeble, but I was no less startled than if it had been coming from just outside the door.
“What?”
“You’ve been out on that porch a long time.”
I would recall this later as the first moment where I began to be frightened, where I realized that by the standards of the outside world, what I’d done knew no justification.
“Mrs. Leverton?”
“Are you two all right, Helen? Is Clair in need?”
“My mother’s fine,” I said.
“I can call my grandson,” she said. “He’ll be glad to help.”
“My mother wanted to go into the yard,” I said.
From where I stood, I could see through the small window over the kitchen sink and across the backyard. I remember my mother arduously training a vine to grow so that it masked a view of our house from the Levertons’ upstairs bedroom. “That man will stare right into your private places,” my mother would say, hanging her front half out my bedroom window, which was directly over the kitchen, threading the vines and risking life and limb to make sure Mr. Leverton never caught a peek. Both the vine and Mr. Leverton were long dead now.
“Is Clair still out there?” Mrs. Leverton asked. “It’s awfully cold.”
This gave me an idea.
“She’s waving at you,” I said.
“The Blameless One,” my mother had called her. “Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth and stupid as the day is long.”
But there was silence on the other end.
“Helen,” Mrs. Leverton said slowly, “are you sure you’re all right?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your mother would never wave at me. We both know that.”
Not so stupid, apparently.
“But that’s pleasant of you to say.”
I had to get my mother’s body in. It was as simple as that.
“Can’t you see her?” I risked.
“I’m in my kitchen now,” Mrs. Leverton said. “It’s five o’clock, and I always start making supper at five o’clock.”
Mrs. Leverton was the champ. At ninety-six, she was the oldest fully functioning member of the neighborhood. My mother had been nothing in comparison to her. When it got down to it, the final competition among women seemed just as inane and graceless as all those in between. Who grew breasts first, who scored the popular boy, who married well, who had the better home. In my mother’s and Mrs. Leverton’s life, it came down to who would be the oldest when she died. I felt like saying, Congratulations, Mrs. Leverton, you’ve won!