“Lynn, could you set the table?” Since you’ve accomplished nothing else useful this summer.
“Sure, Mom.” That’s not fair. I did bring Wylie home, and you made a mess of that.
“Do you like Italian dressing?” At this point I don’t even know what you like, or even, frankly, care.
“Anything’s fine with me.” The feeling’s mutual.
I asked how her day was, and the trials and tribulations of travel-agency life kept us going through most of dinner. A couple who wanted to vacation on cruise ships presented her with a budget of five hundred dollars; another family required a money-back guarantee they wouldn’t come down with food poisoning on a trip to Machu Picchu. Adventure without risk, luxury at economy cost, entertainment without the stress of activities, structure without schedules, and, always, free cocktails: these were the standard demands. Over coffee she asked how my research was going. When I said I’d hit upon an interesting topic for my dissertation, she frowned and said she thought that was already well under way. Probably I’d told her so myself. I explained that this impression was widespread but false.
“It’s those paintings from the old house,” I said. “The ones by Eva Kent? I’m going to incorporate them into my work.”
She looked blank.
“On modernist values in feminist painters of the later twentieth century.”
Now she looked blank but impressed.
“I have a strong feeling about those paintings,” I went on.
“Goodness, those things,” my mother said.
“I’ve been wondering where Dad found them,” I said.
“I told you, I thought probably his secretary. You remember her, don’t you, Mrs. Davidoff? She had terrible bunions. She always asked after you children.”
“I can’t really picture Mrs. Davidoff buying those paintings.”
“Well, maybe not. She was a little severe. Of course I think her feet were giving her an enormous amount of pain. She had surgery eventually, a bunionectomy.”
This gave me pause. “That can’t be a real operation.”
My mother looked offended. “Of course it is.”
“Never mind,” I said. “So do you think Dad could’ve bought them at a gallery? Or did he know any artists?”
“Your father didn’t know anybody except the people he worked with, and us,” she said. “You know that. He didn’t have what you’d call a wide social circle.”
“So where did he get them?”
“Well, sometimes they have those kiosks at the mall,” she suggested.
I tried to picture Eva peddling her strange nudes outside a food court, and my father interrupting his shopping to speak with her, holding the painting by its frame and nodding his head in appreciation of the couple in Desert I: The Wilderness Kiss. Neither part of this was imaginable. When I was in middle school he almost always came home late from work, and would heat up his dinner in the microwave as I sat at the table and told him about my day. He’d eat straight out of the container, apparently indifferent to what it was, and I often thought I could’ve covered cardboard or mud patties or Styrofoam packing peanuts with tomato sauce and he wouldn’t have noticed.
“I still think it’s possible Bev Davidoff got it somewhere,” my mother went on. “Secretaries used to do that kind of thing. There’s no big mystery about it, Lynn. It was just a gift.”
“But two paintings — a pair?”
“Maybe it was a sale,” she said drily. “Frankly, I’m surprised you’re even interested. You never seemed to care about New Mexican art before.”
“I know,” I said. “Listen, I saw Daphne Michaelson today.”
My mother wrinkled her nose in a gesture I took for distaste and wrapped her hands around her coffee cup. “Did you,” she said. “Where?”
I stared at her. Did she think that Daphne Michaelson was out grocery shopping or hiking in the foothills? Did she have any idea what condition the woman was in? “I went to their house. Well, I went to look at our old house, and while I was there I stopped by the Michaelsons’ to say hello. David wasn’t there but Donny was, and so was she.”
“I see. So what does it look like? The house.”
“It’s covered in giant butterflies.”
“Fake ones, I hope.”
“They look tacky.”
“The people who bought the house seemed very nice,” my mother said in a pious tone. “A young couple with children.”
“How long has she been crazy?” I said. “I don’t remember anything strange from when we lived there.”
“It’s not nice to call people crazy.” My mother stood up and began clearing the dishes. “Donny’s a nice boy, isn’t he? And Darren is, too. When he’s away at school he calls David every Sunday night at seven o’clock sharp.”
“So you’ve told me,” I said. I followed her into the kitchen, carrying the sugar bowl and the rest of the plates.
“I always wondered why Wylie wasn’t better friends with those boys. I know they’re a bit younger, but it’s not that big an age gap.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I’m not. They’re perfectly sweet.”
“They kill frogs for sport.”
“Toads, aren’t they? And he didn’t know that until the other night,” she said, dismissing it with a wave of her hand. Then she filled a sink with water and started doing dishes. I grabbed a towel and took over the drying. For a few minutes we worked together in a harmony I had a hard time puncturing. The condo’s air-conditioning pumped audibly for a moment, then subsided. Outside, crickets sang their shrill, unmelodic song.
“You never answered my question,” I finally said.
“What question was that?”
“About Mrs. Michaelson. How long she’s been like that.” I started putting plates and cups in the cupboard, lining them up in careful rows.
“I’m not sure,” she said after a while. “I do know that her condition doesn’t seem to be worsening. If she takes her medication and avoids stress, she’s fine. David briefly had her in some kind of, you know, residence, but he couldn’t stand seeing her in there. So he brought her home.”
“How much does she understand of what’s going on?”
“You know, Lynn, I’ve never asked her,” my mother said, glancing away and — I suspected — rolling her eyes. She turned off the faucet and drained the sink, then paused for a moment with a sponge in her hand. “Up until ten years or so ago she was really quite lucid. When you kids were young we had no idea. You could talk to her, and she was odd — but within reason, you know.”
“So to speak,” I said.
She ignored me and set to wiping the sink and the surface of the stove, which, I didn’t point out to her, was not dirty in the first place. “But then something happened, with the medication or something. I’m really not sure. Apparently your brain can adjust so the medication’s no longer effective. Anyway, she got worse.” She stood in the sparkling kitchen, looking for something else to clean. When she couldn’t find anything, she put her hands on her hips and nodded, once.
“David will never leave her,” I said. “Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Of course it bothers me,” she said, her voice rough. “It bothers me that you come home for the summer and do your best to ignore me from the minute you get here. It bothers me that my son lives in the same city I do and I’m lucky to see him every two months. A great many things bother me, Lynn, but I try to keep going as best I can.”