I dialed the phone with my back to my mother’s body. For some reason I felt disloyal to her. I worried, if I were to turn, that her corpse would be sitting up and raging at me while pulling her skirt back down.
I had read in the paper that Avery Banks, one of the last of Jake’s graduate assistants at U-Mad, was now an associate professor of sculpture at Tyler in Philadelphia. I racked my brain for the town the article had said he and his wife bought a house in. He had two children-daughters, I remembered-but in order to find him, I was going to have to engage in random-patterned directory-assistance hell. I called information three times. Finally, in Germantown, there was a listing.
“Is this Avery Banks?” I said when a voice greeted me.
“Who may I say is calling?”
“Helen Knightly,” I said. I took my finger and lightly touched the numbers on the phone’s base, counting inside my head to calm myself.
“I don’t know a Helen Knightly,” he said.
“So this is Avery then?”
He was silent.
“You knew me as Helen Trevor, Jake Trevor’s wife.”
“Helen?”
“Yes.”
“Helen, it’s so good to hear from you. How are you?”
“I need to eat,” I said. In the hours since I had come over to my mother’s and killed her, I hadn’t eaten anything.
“Are you all right, Helen?” he asked. I imagined him standing by his phone with a ski mask on. Avery had favored full-body coverage when he went out in the cold with Jake.
“Something’s gone wrong,” I said. I could feel my desire to collapse, to blurt out to someone what I had done, where I was, what lay behind me on the floor. “Hold on a minute, Avery.”
I turned sharply around, set the receiver on the taped-up high chair, and walked to my mother’s body. I was relieved to find that she didn’t move. Not even a twitch. I walked back to the phone and turned on the overhead light before picking the receiver back up. Mrs. Leverton would be sleeping now. I needed the chastening effect of the light switched on. As the fluorescent halo buzzed to life above my mother’s head, I breathed in deeply and took control. I did not want him to hear so much as a quaver in my voice.
“I need to get in touch with Jake,” I said.
“I haven’t talked to him in a while,” he said. “I do have a number for him, if you like.”
“I’ll take it.”
Avery told me the number, and methodically, I repeated it back. I did not recognize the area code.
“Thank you. I really appreciate it,” I said.
“I hope you don’t mind my saying this, Helen,” he said, “but it wasn’t your fault Jake didn’t get tenure. I’ve always worried you might have blamed yourself.”
I thought of Avery standing in our living room in Madison. How he and Jake packed boxes and carried them silently out to Avery’s Ford. I saw Avery going toward the white pickup, carrying the hand-me-down bassinet.
“Sarah, our youngest, is singing jazz at a nightclub in New York,” I lied. “She’s quite accomplished at what she does.”
“That’s great.”
There was a silence on the line that neither of us filled.
“Thank you again, Avery.”
“Be well,” he said. I heard the beep of his phone as he hung up.
I closed my eyes and kept the phone to my ear until a recorded voice came on, informing me that the phone was off the hook. I saw myself in Wisconsin, walking out from behind the scrim of trees that surrounded Jake’s ice dragon. All the full professors from the college had gathered to see it before the thaw set in, even the dean. I had ruined it by inadvertently breaking the transparent spine along its back. Later that night, the fight that unraveled us began. Suddenly, I could not imagine calling him.
Using my fingers, I felt along the wall to switch off the buzzing halo. I knelt once more to my task, and with the dripping sponge in hand, I hovered at the edge of my mother’s underwear.
I peeled down her old-fashioned panties. They came away in my hands, the elastic shot through on both legs. I had grown used to the smell of her by now, a sort of fecal-mothball combo, with a sprinkle here and there of talc.
In order to remove her underpants, I ripped them open, and her body jiggled just a bit. I thought of the bronze statues that artists cast to resemble people doing everyday things. A bronze golfer to meet you on the green. A bronze couple to share a bench with you in a city park. Two bronze children playing leapfrog in a field. It had become a cottage industry. Middle-Aged Woman Ripping Underpants off Dead Mother. It seemed perfect to me. One could commission it for a schoolyard, where students ran from the building after working all morning with numbers and words. They could climb on the two of us at recess or drown flies in the dew that pooled in my mother’s eyes.
And there it was, the hole that had given birth to me. The cleft that had compelled the mystery of my father’s love for forty years.
This was not the first time I’d been face-to-face with my mother’s genitalia. In the last decade, I had become my mother’s official enema-giver. She would lie down, in a position not dissimilar to the one she now held, and after massaging her thighs and reassuring her that it would not hurt, I would open her legs. Working quickly, I would execute the doctor’s orders and then descend the stairs alone, walking like a robot to the refrigerator, where I scarfed down leftover cubes of lime Jell-O and stared out the window into the backyard.
I placed the sponge back in the aqua-green sick bowl and rose from the floor. I drained the old water out and refilled it with fresh hot water, squirting in more soap. Then I took the kitchen scissors down from the magnetized knife rack above the sink and knelt again to my work.
The green night-light above the stove and the light of the moon coming through the window were my only companions. With the scissors, I sliced my mother’s skirt from hem to waist. I laid it open on either side of her. I began, ever so gently, to bathe her hips and belly, her thighs and the virtually hairless cleft. I dipped the cloth and sponge repeatedly into the scalding soapy water and stopped over and over again to change it, wishing for the bathtub in the work shed, for a place we could lie together, as if I were a child again and she was stepping in behind me in the tub.
Finally, when I had removed all evidence of her accident and retrieved a fresh sponge from where they were kept above the fridge, I unbuttoned my mother’s loose cotton shirt. I sliced away the straps of her old putty-colored bra. I squeezed out clean water from the sponge onto her breastbone.
Without the bra supporting it, my mother’s remaining breast had fallen so far to the side that her nipple almost grazed the floor. Her mastectomy scar, once a dark slash, was now barely a wrinkled whisper of flesh. “I know you suffered,” I said, and after kissing the fingertips of my hand, I traced them along her scar.
I must have been a teenager. It was still years before my father’s death. Years before she called me over to feel the hard mass just beneath her armpit. I was standing in the doorway, watching them.
“You know how hard it is for me,” my mother said to my father, tears streaming down her face. “Only you know.”
She had unbuttoned her shirt and held it open to him. “Clair!” he gasped. She had rubbed a bloody wound in the center of her chest. I always thought of it as an adult’s version of chicken, which was a game we played at school. Another kid would rub his nail across the inside of your wrist two hundred times. If you couldn’t bear it after the benign rubbing turned into a ribbon of blood, you yelled, “Chicken!” and were known by the name.