Eileen had long been able to tell her mother about the fights over Ed’s career and know that she would click her tongue and shake her head in censure of his lack of drive. Some change was occurring in her mother, though, to make her less pragmatic. She seemed less bothered by her station in life. She stopped complaining about politics, or the idiots on the subway, or the ugliness and stench of city life. She read novels and met with a group to discuss them. Eileen couldn’t help feeling a little betrayed. She figured part of this transformation was her mother trying anything to avoid taking a drink. “Negative thoughts back you into a corner,” her mother said to her, smiling, one afternoon after returning from a picnic with the baby in Flushing Meadow Park. “They multiply and surround you. Don’t think of what you don’t have. Try to focus on the simple pleasures.” It was rich, this spouting of shibboleths, this late-stage wisdom-mongering. It was the tactic of a woman who’d played her hand and lost, or worse, never played it to begin with. But her mother had picked the wrong audience for her speech. It may have gone over well with down-and-outers at AA who’d wrecked their lives and slipped into a spiral of regret, but Eileen’s problem wasn’t negative thinking, it was too little positive thinking on the part of everyone around her. She had a vision, and she wasn’t turning away from it for a second, even if her husband, and now her mother, saw some ugliness in it. At least she had her father on her side — though God bless him, he supported anything you threw your heart into. She was going to do that, no question about it. What waited ahead, if only Ed would walk the path she’d laid out for him, was a beautiful life, an American life.
“One day at a time,” her mother said, and Eileen thought, And everything all at once.
• • •
Christmas of 1980 Eileen bought Ed a VCR. They’d looked at them together, but when he’d seen what they cost — about a thousand dollars — he had decided they could live without one. Eileen hadn’t worked hard all her life to sit on her hands when she could afford to buy something. She was making decent money now that she was the nursing director at Lawrence Hospital in Bronxville. It was the perfect gift for him, considering how much he loved old movies. Starting in August, she paid for it on layaway.
When he unwrapped it, he looked horrified, as if it were a relic unearthed from a sacred burial ground that would bring a curse down upon their heads.
“How could you do this?” he asked, seething in front of the three-year-old boy. “How could you think of buying this?”
A few days later, she came in from the shower and saw him on his haunches putting a tape in the machine. She gave him a sardonic look.
“All right,” he said. “I was wrong. It’s a great gift.”
“Save it.”
“I mean it. It was thoughtful of you.” He was clutching the empty sleeve of the VHS tape to his chest. “I appreciate it.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“Look, I know I get set in my ways.”
“You’re telling me.”
“Doesn’t mean I can’t learn a thing or two.”
He wheeled the TV cart over, so that it was right next to the bed. PBS was on, the fund-raising appeal between programs. Ed patted the bed. “Get in,” he said.
“I’ve got to brush my hair out.”
“Come on,” he said. “I want to make sure I get this whole thing on tape.”
“Anyway, I’m happy you’re using it.”
“What can I say?” He threw his arms out in amused resignation. “You’re good for me. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“Really?”
“Really and truly. I’d be lost without you.”
Sometimes it felt like all the difficulty he put her through was worth it. It was a rare man who’d admit so thoroughly that he’d been wrong.
“Honey,” she said, and she dropped her towel and stood naked before him the way he was always trying to get her to do. At first she hunched a bit, and then she stood tall, her hands at her hips, feasting on his gaze and letting him drink in her body. The movie was starting, but Ed didn’t take his eyes off her. She felt herself blush. “You’d better hit record,” she said. Ed didn’t stop looking at her. She climbed on him and hit the button.
“We can watch it later,” he said, kissing her neck. “That’s the genius of this thing.” He moved his hand down her back, squeezed her butt, touched her sex.
“Anytime we want,” she said breathlessly.
She rolled off him and ripped the sheet away. He lowered the volume and yanked his underwear off. She reached across him to switch off the bedside lamp and he thrust up into her, flipped her onto her back. The tape whirred rhythmically. The television pulsed, filling the room with light and plunging it into darkness, outlining their bodies in the lovely deep of night.
• • •
In January of 1981, her mother was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus.
A nurse came to the apartment, but her father did his share of nursing too. Eileen would go over after work and find that he’d given her medicine, bathed her, changed her clothes, made her a liquid meal — she could no longer eat solid foods — and tucked her in. He’d moved into her room, and slept in the other twin bed.
The day her mother entered the hospital for good — November 23, 1981—her father mentioned some pains in his chest. They admitted him and found that he had been concealing his own cancer, which had spread throughout his chest cavity, colonizing the organs. They gave him his own room, down the hall from her mother. They rolled them out to see each other once a day.
Her parents had slept in separate rooms for thirty years, but a few days before Christmas, when the doctors rolled her mother away from her father for what would turn out to be the last time, she called to him from down the hall.
“Don’t let them take me away from you, Mike, my Mike!” she said, for all on the floor to hear.
• • •
What they didn’t hear was what she asked Eileen later that night, with the tubes in her.
The curtain was drawn. The lights were off except for the one above her bed. Eileen had filled two cups with ice water, but both were left full and the ice had long ago melted.
“Was it worth it?”
Eileen leaned in to hear her better. “Was what worth it, Ma?”
“I didn’t touch a drop for twenty-five years. Did it make a difference?”
She felt an uncomfortable grin forming on her face. She wasn’t at all happy, but she couldn’t keep this ghoulish smile away. She didn’t want to show her mother how much she was hurting. Through the open door, she heard the distant beeps of call buttons and voices in intercoms. She had worked in a hospital for twenty years, but somehow she felt she was in a place she’d never been before. Under the green glow of the fluorescent lamp, her mother looked like a wraith, her skin so thin you could count the veins.
“How can you ask that?”
“I’m asking you.” Her mother shifted her head on her pillow with great effort. Her cheeks were two smooth hollows beneath large, alert eyes. “Was it worth it?”
Eileen had thought of the time since her mother had gotten sober as the happiest of both of their lives. There had been a quiet thawing of the glacier in her mother’s heart, with occasional louder crackings-off of icebergs of emotions, until, after Connell was born, it had melted so thoroughly that all that remained in an ocean of equanimity were little islands of occasional despond. Her mother appeared almost joyful at times. But perhaps it had been a performance.
“Of course,” Eileen said, taking her hand.
“I wish I hadn’t stopped.” Her mother didn’t look at her but gazed at the folds of the curtain, her other hand palm down on the blanket.