30 Pieces of a Novel (58 page)

liked sitting beside so she could watch the people passing, after that to a coffee bar on the same block—he got her a decaffeinated coffee but told her it was regular, that's what Angela said the doctor wants her to have if she does have coffee; he'd prefer her to stick with hot cocoa or a mild tea—another regret? No, and even though she wasn't supposed to have a drink either, and if a drink then just a wine or beer, he got her her favorite: Jack Daniels on the rocks with a little water and twist of lemon, “Because what else are they going to take away from me,” she once asked, “food and air too?”—and a flaky Danish-like pastry she loved, with peaches and walnuts in it. She asked that day at both places and while he wheeled her along the street the same kinds of questions she usually did, and some of them several times: “You feeling okay? Your wife. Everything considering, she's all right, no change? And your lovely daughters, they okay too? They doing well in school? Of course they are, look who are their parents,” and he said, “Sally, maybe, but not me, and I mean by that their brains.” “How old are they now? … I can't believe it, where'd all the time go? You still teaching? You have enough money? You know, if you ever need a loan … I don't have much but you can have it all, because what good is it going to do me? Where do you live these days? Not in New York? How far is Baltimore from here? That much? I didn't realize. How long have you lived so far away? You don't think, if you looked, there'd be something closer that was as good?” Another thing to regret: that he's lived down there the last fourteen years? They kept his wife's old student apartment near Columbia, sublet it more than they used it. Whenever they came up, though, and stayed there he saw her every day for lunch and sometimes dropped by around five for drinks and cheese and crackers. Regrets that they didn't come up more. The drive was long and tedious for him, but he should have done it more often. She loved seeing the girls. And before their older one started middle school, when absences began counting against her, they stayed at their apartment all of June and three weeks during the Christmas break instead of what they'd done the last four years, ten to eleven days. And when she was still in nursery school and kindergarten, they came up for around five weeks and he maybe skipped seeing his mother one or two days. Then he wheeled her home, didn't ask if she wanted to walk the chair, knew she couldn't, helped her onto the bed—“Suddenly I feel very tired. In the restaurant I was fine. I didn't have anything alcoholic to drink, did I?” and he said, “Let's just say I kept diluting your Jack Daniels with water so you wouldn't drink it almost straight and get looped there,” and she said, “Now that was a mean thing for you to do”—sat beside her a couple of hours while she napped, and then got up and leaned over her and said, “Mom, Mom, listen, I have to be going and I want to say goodbye,” and she opened her eyes and smiled and said, “Thank you, my darling,” and he said, “Thank you, nothing; it's been my pleasure. I love taking you out and seeing you, and I just wish I could do it more often; I'll try to,” and she said, “That'd be nice. You're the only one who'll give me a drink and I get to eat a good lunch and enjoy myself so much with,” and he kissed her forehead and cheek and then her forehead again—it was wet, didn't feel warm when he touched it with his fingers. Maybe she was sweating because the room was too warm or it was the drink or it could be one of the medicines she's taking or she had a fever. Can a forehead be cold and the body feverish at the same time? Another regret is that he didn't tell Angela about it. Just knocked on her door, and she said through it, “Yes, sir?” and he said, “I'm going.” Maybe the infection was only just setting in and in a few weeks gradually grew into that awful hoarse cough and labored breathing—spread to her lungs, he's saying—and was what finally killed her. “She's been declining for months,” her doctor said on the phone the day before she died. “She won't pull through this time, a hospital's not going to improve her chances, so it's mainly a matter of where you think she'll be most comfortable. I always tell the patient's immediate survivors that, unless there's physical or emotional suffering involved on either side, home's the ideal.” Then she shut her eyes, smile gone, seemed to fall back to sleep, and he got his coat and briefcase, stuck his books and newspaper in it, looked into her room, she seemed to be sleeping peacefully, thought of going over to kiss her, didn't want to disturb her, and left. He'll call her when he gets home, he thought, walking to the subway. She'll most likely be up and will like hearing from him. He didn't. Another regret. Would have been so nice. “Mom, I just got in,” she'd ask where, he'd say, “From New York, where I saw you today: I took the train, and first thing I'm doing—I don't even have my coat off—is calling you.” No, too obvious. “Mom, I just got back from New York, where I saw you, and wanted to know how you are and if you had your dinner.” Forget the dinner. Just “How are you, what are you doing?” She'd have said, “I'm all right, I guess,” and, “Nothing, as usual.” Another regret is that he didn't stay overnight in their apartment, come over in the morning, and take her out for breakfast or if it was raining or too cold, made her breakfast in her apartment with things he brought over and knew she liked—bagels, Canadian bacon, strawberries, Friendship pot cheese, a special fruit juice—and then left for the train. Or just stayed longer by her bed that afternoon. Read, maybe taken a quick walk. Then had a drink with her when she awoke: Jack Daniels on the rocks for him (it was the only hard stuff in the house, though he could have bought a bottle of vodka in his quick walk), a very watered-down one for her, because there wasn't any great need for him to get home before the kids went to sleep, and it was Saturday, so they'd still be up at ten or eleven and he could see them if he got on the train by seven or eight. And the kids didn't need to be driven anywhere early the next morning that he remembers. Even if they did, he could have called Sally and asked her to get a friend to drive them or the parent of the kid whose house his daughter was going to; that it was more important he go home later that day than he thought or to stay the night in New York and leave tomorrow around noon because his mother seemed to be getting weaker—she was definitely getting weaker and thinner and less lucid, and he wanted to spend more time with her while he had the chance. Misses her, can't stop thinking of her. Well, it's not as if he tries to stop. He's just always thinking of her, or a lot. He can be doing anything, taking a run, a shower, shaving, slapping something on toast, sitting in a chair eating or reading, talking on the phone (he's only been able to talk—won't even pick up the phone when it rings; his kids and wife have to and then tell him who it is—to a few close friends and his mother's accountant and the cousin who looked in on her in New York the past few years and is now going through her own mourning and calls up to talk to him or Sally about it: “How strange. I never knew I'd feel this way once she was gone. I almost thought it'd bring relief, to me and her, though I can't especially say how, since she for the most part was in relatively good health for someone her age and I enjoyed her company, and now I grieve that I won't be catching the One-oh-four bus to see her and stopping in a store along the way to get her a buttered soft roll,” and he said “Same here, though not the relief part. But honestly, Lottie, I can't talk about it yet like this”), when suddenly she pops into his head, if he isn't already talking about her, like with Lottie, and he often starts crying. He thinks about writing a poem about her. Anything: her youth, what she meant to him, times with her when he was a boy, her relationship with his dad, one composed of just phrases and things she liked to say. He doesn't write poems. Last was a series of them to Sally a few weeks after he met her and the first time she broke off with him, titling them “2S1,” “2S2,” through “2S11” and finally “2Sdozen.” He threw out his copies of them about a year later but wonders if she kept the originals he sent her one by one after he wrote them, sometimes going outside at two and three in the morning to drop them into a mailbox. He takes out his pen and starts writing, cries during part of it, and finishes in a few minutes. It all just came. He'd stop about ten seconds between each completed sentence before going to the next. Should he write another? No, this one says what he wants. He reads it and changes only the second “laid” to “lay.” “How could my mother not be alive?/ My mother has always been alive. / I clutched her around and cried, / ‘Mommy, Mommy, it's all right, / Mommy,' and then she died. / I laid her sideways on the pillow / and she lay there always. / She has always been there. / When I come to this city I will / be coming to see her. / Things won't change, will they? / How could my mother not be alive? / How could she? Things don't change. / I'll never be the same. / Speak to me, Mommy, speak to me. / It all goes on and I cannot stop.” He'd like to be able to—of course he would, but finish the thought—to be able to type it up, change nothing else in it, and stick the original into an envelope and send it to her. He'd like, he'd like. And Express Mail. To go to the post office and get one of those Express Mail envelopes and send it that way so she can get it early the next day. And with a note in it. Now that's enough. But what would he say?
Dear Mom, I'm so glad you can receive this, your loving son, Gould
. So what to do with the poem? He tears the page out of the notebook and puts it inside the book he's been reading but hasn't read more than a few pages of since he took it on the train to New York the day she died. Phone rings and he yells out, “I don't want to speak to anyone now, no one, not even my cousin,” and his wife says from her studio, “I understand, but what should I say if it's for you, you're not here?” Phone's still ringing. “Say, if they don't already know, that my mother died and I am here but I don't feel I can talk to anyone now but her and my kids and wife. That I'm low—feeling as low as I've ever felt in my life.” “You want me to say that?” “Pick up the phone if you want and say anything, but please stop its ringing; the damn noise is killing me,” and she picks it up, and he quietly moves to the kitchen by her studio and listens as she says, “No, no, it's coming along; he's very upset, of course,” and he says, “Upset? What a word for it. I don't know exactly what I am but I'm a helluva lot worse than upset,” and she's probably looking his way, shaking her head, doing things like that and the expression to go with it—he can't see her nor she him—and she says, “Please, Gould, don't make it any tougher,” so her hand's probably on the talking part of the receiver, and he says, “Sorry, no harm meant, but what can you expect? Though that's no excuse,” and goes back to his chair in the living room. The cat comes in and heads toward him, and he says, “Listen, I don't want to pet you and you've already been fed plenty, so go away,” and the cat gets by his feet and seems ready to jump into his lap. “Did you hear me? I don't want that,” wagging his finger. Cat jumps up, and he puts him on the floor. Jumps right back up, and he says, “What is it with you? I know you know something's wrong and you're trying to comfort me but not … right … now,” and with one hand underneath he holds him over the floor from about three feet up and lets him drop. The cat scoots up onto the chair opposite him, stares at him after he settles himself, and then tucks his front paws under his chest and closes his eyes for sleep. “You understand,” he says, low, “that it's that I don't want to touch or be touched by my wife either for any kind of loving or solace or easement. My kids, yes, to hold them, but right now, and for I don't know how long but I'm sure no more than a couple of weeks, I don't want to be held. Oh, what am I saying?” and thinks he's got to do something. Sitting here or lying on his bed or walking around the neighborhood, all he can do is think of his mother and what he didn't do for her. He goes into the bathroom and pees, though he had no urge to, just to get up and do something. Move, move, keep busy, that's the ticket. Folds the towels on the rack. Then folds them the more intricate but right way, horizontally in half and then vertically in thirds and then over. Then he sweeps the bathroom floor and washes it with diluted ammonia and rags. On his knees, just as his mother didn't do; she used a mop but he can't stand those things, the stringy ones, which you have to wring out by hand if you don't have a bucket with a wringer, or the sponge mops they have that are too damn slow to use, where you have to squeeze them with that metal piece every two square feet of mopped floor. Rags are the best, rags, rags: rinse them under the kitchen faucet after you're through and then throw them into the washer, though make sure you don't wash any clothes or linens with them—all that lint. Same with the kitchen: sweeps it, then spills diluted ammonia on the floor and gets on his knees with the rags and starts swabbing. “What are you doing?” his wife says; “the smell,” and he says, “Cleaning. I feel I want—I don't feel, I just want, and I don't mean by that correction anything but that I want everything to be clean, tidy, neat, even sparkling. And it's something to do, I need something physical to do.” “If that's the case, after you're done, the shed needs emptying out and tidying up.” “Good, will do,” and he finishes swabbing and then dries the floor with paper towels. But first finish cleaning the house, he thinks, and vacuums every room, changes the kitty litter box, remakes all the beds, scours the kitchen sink, wipes down the refrigerator and stove and countertops, takes the clothes from yesterday out of the dryer and folds them and puts them away in various drawers, cleans the toilets and tub and shower stall and refolds the towels in the other bathroom, goes outside and cleans out the shed, has a whole bunch of things from it and the basement to take to the dump, and puts them all in the van, yells out to his wife, “I'm off to the dump,” and goes. While he's driving he thinks, Turn the radio on to one of the classical music stations, but there might be voices, news, promos, thank-yous for contributing to a recent fund drive, and so on, and he really doesn't want to hear music right now either. He thinks his mother would have liked to come to the dump if she were here.