A Perfect Life (20 page)

I saw him sitting in his cabin, drinking glass after glass of the chocolate milk he had bought for the son who'd just left.

“The long and the short of it is, if she wants you to change, you change.”

He made it sound easy. In truth, I had always thought it was difficult to change. My sister used to spend hours practicing new ways to sign her name,
Laurel Weiss, Laurel Weiss,
forcing her hand to crown the
W
and
L
with curly loops. But whenever she grew impatient, she signed her name with the same blocky capital letters she had learned in elementary school.

We walked through Men's Haberdasheries, past ties and suspenders of a quality the store had never carried. I pushed a door with no nameplate and was relieved to see my father's office exactly as it had been. He sat behind his desk, signing checks. “Janie!” He got to his feet and held me at arm's length and inspected me. I began to say
Don't
, then realized I had been inspecting him, too, to see how badly he had aged in the few months since I'd seen him. “I'm sorry to take you away from your work for this silly business. If it was up to me, we'd just go see the rabbi and get this over with. But Honey wants the real thing. And hell, it's the broad's last chance.” He cuffed Willie's arm. “No offense, son. Your mother may be a broad, but she's the classiest broad on the planet.” He fingered my shirt. “Why don't you run upstairs and pick out something nice.” He jerked his thumb toward the ceiling. “You ought
to see it. Fancy sofas and chairs. Whatnots on the tables. Honey's still hocking me to redo the fitting room—you know, divide it into stalls. I say, what's the matter with the fitting room the way it is, all one big space? One dame doesn't like to see another dame in her
gatkes
? And she says no, if women see each other trying on clothes they start comparing themselves, each one thinks the other one is skinnier or she's got a bigger bust, and next thing you know, everybody's got their own clothes back on and they're headed out the door.” He waited to hear whose side I would take.

“That's okay, Dad,” I said. “I already have a dress,” and I offered silent thanks to Maureen that I did. I had been avoiding that fitting room for years, as if my mother's reflection might still be flitting from glass to glass, trapped in the room where she had spent so many hours trying on the latest clothes.

“And what about you?” My father jabbed Willie in the ribs. “We've got some irregular suits on special. Not that I would expect you to pay, now you're family.”

I needed a moment to understand he meant Willie would be his stepson. Never mind Willie's mother, what would my father think if I dated—or married—Willie?

“Thanks for the offer, Herb.” Willie returned my father's jab. “But I've got the clothes situation under control.”

I asked if my father wanted us to pick up some groceries on our way through town.

“Ahh,” he said, “you didn't shlep all this way to cook for me. Besides, Honey ordered a crate of stuff from New York. She worries I don't eat right when she's not here.”

Which he probably didn't. Since my mother's death, he had subsisted largely on sandwiches and hot dogs he brought home from the snack shop at the store.

“I've got to finish these checks. Maybe you could do me a favor. It's her things. Someone needs to get rid of them before Honey moves in.”

“Her” meant my mother. But I wasn't sure which “things” he meant me to throw out. A week after my mother's death, my father had given all her clothing to the thrift shop. He had kept only her hairbrush and her cap from graduation.

“The kitchen things,” he said. “You know how women are,” as if I weren't one myself but had studied them at college. “One woman doesn't want to cook with another woman's things. Your mother's books are in the basement. If you want them, they're yours. If not, just get rid of them.”

We left him at the store, doing work he had manufactured so he wouldn't have to watch his daughter throw out his wife's textbooks from college. The Jeep crawled slowly up the hill, Willie peering out the windshield like an elderly woman afraid of breaking a hip. “I'll come in for a while,” he offered. “If you want me to come in.” But I could tell he was anxious to drive to the motel where his mother and Ted were staying. “He's hitching in,” Willie said. “I used to hitch all over. But it's not like it used to be. And Ted, well, he's not much of a fighter. I know it doesn't matter if I wait up for him. But I'd rather be there, in case he calls.”

I shook my head to clear the image of my sister driving to Mule's Neck on the back of Cruz's motorbike. That icy
ramp, unlit. Cruz, a stranger, unaware of how sharply the exit curved.

“See you at the wedding,” Willie said. And he left me standing in front of the house in which my mother had lived and died and in which my father would be getting married to another woman the following day.

I tottered up the walk, balancing my weight between my suitcase in one arm and the mouse cage in the other. For weeks I had been trying to get the homozygous mouse to mate. Despite Maureen's report that he had humped that rubber toy, he had refused to mount a real mate. Maybe the disease had rendered him infertile. Still, I kept hoping. Some mice are just picky. Before leaving Cambridge, I had placed a new female in the cage; I had brought along the pair because I needed to record the exact date they mated—this involved a twice-daily gynecological exam of the girl mouse—so I wouldn't miss the birth.

The dining room had been enlarged and an extension added. The new room looked like a greenhouse, with tropical flowers and potted plants. In the corner stood my globe, so exotic and oversized it might have been a meteor that had landed in the middle of the new Persian rug. I found the spot where Mule's Neck would have been if the mapmaker had marked places that small. Until now, my father had left his hometown only to be a soldier in World War II and to pursue a cure to the disease that killed his wife. I spun the globe, praying that he and Willie's mother would have time to travel everywhere, to make love in strange beds, to eat good meals, to see interesting sights.

The new kitchen was double the size of the old one, all butcher block and tile. Lined up along one wall were my mother's old dishes, which had probably cost twenty dollars for the set when she had bought them at Weiss's. I wrapped the dishes for the thrift shop. In another carton, I packed the glass dessert-bowls in which I had displayed the eggs for my science-fair project. But I kept the Waring blender, which my father had brought home from the store to help my mother make baby food to suit Laurel's finicky taste. I stroked the jar of ribbed glass, the beveled silver base with its four upright prongs. The year I had spent nursing my mother through the last ravages of her illness, I had used this blender to mix chicken for her dinner. I had tied a beautician's smock around her neck, tilted her body forward, and spooned the gruel in her mouth. I had reminded her to swallow, made sure her mouth was clear, then spooned in more gruel, following the method I had read in a pamphlet that began: “So, you got the news, your loved one has Valentine's.”

Once, just to hear myself talk, I had explained to my mother that a blender exactly like this one had been used to perform one of modern biology's most famous experiments. The blender was the perfect equipment with which to shake loose the tails of viral phage from the bacteria they had latched on to, allowing scientists to study the DNA with which the virus had infected the cells. I hated that blender, remembering all the times I hadn't run it long enough so the meat was too thick and my mother gagged, or the times I had neglected to strain the puree and my mother had coughed and coughed, spraying pap across the
room. Still, this blender had kept her alive a year longer than she might otherwise have lived.

I set aside my mother's tablecloths for Laurel, and the little yellow corn-holders Laurel and I had bought our mother for her birthday one year. It was after eight thirty. My father couldn't invent things to do much longer at the store. I went down to the basement and found the box of books. On top of the stack was a spiral-bound notebook with a psychedelic cover. Given all the money that my mother's parents had wasted on their sons' education, they hadn't been inclined to send her to college, too. She hadn't started school until the 1960s, a middle-aged housewife in tailored suits amid long-haired kids in jeans. Like Laurel, I had resented her new career. I was still at that age when I assumed my mother's attention should be devoted to me. But I couldn't help but feel proud that she was smarter than other mothers. Bored as I was at school, she allowed me to skip my classes and go to hers. We rode back and forth to Albany, chatting about astronomy or math. Once, during lunch, I asked about the smell in the college cafeteria. It was like my father's cigars, only sweeter.

“Oh, it's marijuana,” she told me absently. “Some of the boys were smoking it in organic chem the other day.” She didn't seem to care what her classmates smoked. She was too intent on making up for all those lost years—after she finished her undergraduate degree, she started taking classes toward her doctorate in biology—to notice that the men wore earrings or the young women went braless or her notebooks were covered with multicolored sequins that changed their patterns when you moved your eyes.

“Biology 212, Introductory Genetics,” read the title of one such notebook. My mother had recorded the instructor's lectures in obsessive detail, with meticulous illustrations in colored ink. These were the notes of someone who feared she might forget her own name if she didn't write it down. And this was, in fact, the first information she had lost. “I don't know,” she said, studying for the comprehensive exams for her Ph.D., exams she never took because she didn't see the point, she had been diagnosed by then, “it's as if everything I've learned is one of those lazy Susans down at King's, and it's spinning so fast I can't grab the answers I want.” The rest of the box was filled with thick texts like
Advanced Neuroanatomy
and
Mammalian Genetics
. On page 467 of this latter text was the information that Valentine's chorea was inherited in a dominant Mendelian fashion. The disease, the text said, had no known treatment or cure. The passage had been highlighted in yellow marker, so I knew that she must have read it.

I set aside
Reproductive Biology
, with its Technicolor photos of fetuses in various stages of development, the first such photos ever taken from inside a human womb. It occurred to me that my mother's years as a parent hadn't been the obstacle to her education I had always assumed they were, but the spur to go to college and study how a child unfolded from an egg and a sperm.

I had just repacked the books when my father came home. He looked around the kitchen to make sure I had done what he had asked. “Come on,” he said. “Help me get rid of all this food that Honey sent before it goes bad.”

I built us both sandwiches. My father washed down his meal with brandy, then bit off the tip of a cigar and began to smoke.

“So,” he said, “what'd you think of the store? I wouldn't have minded retiring. But no one would have bought the chain in the shape those stores were in. I saved enough money for you and Laurel. But now there's Honey to think about, and Ted.” His cigar made him cough. I had never heard him cough from smoking. “I'll still be working less. Honey found some smart boychik with a Harvard MBA to oversee the day-to-day operations. I'd rather spend my time running the foundation. Besides, a woman like Honey doesn't marry an old fart like me so she can sit around and twiddle her thumbs. She's got a condo lined up for us in Palm Springs.” He peered at me to see if I would object. “You think all your old man's good for is selling pots and pans?” He tapped the ashes from his cigar. The stench of tobacco made my stomach contract. “I'm not quitting the foundation. But Honey's right, a man deserves a few good years before he kicks off.”

“Of course you do,” I said, although I couldn't imagine my father sunning himself in Palm Springs. Like most daughters, I couldn't imagine my father as anything other than what he had been when I was young. “Dad?” I said. “Did you and Mom ever think you shouldn't have kids?”

“Ahh,” he said, “why bring all that up now.” He tossed back another shot of brandy. “People didn't think that way back then. Who knew why children got sick? Whooping cough. Polio. If it wasn't a bum heart, it was measles or scar
let fever. Maybe if you heard some girl's mother had run off with the milkman, or her uncle liked little boys, you would have thought twice about marrying into a family like that. But your mother? She was like any woman. She wanted babies. She wanted a home. A woman didn't decide not to have a kid just because her father and brothers had died of some crazy disease most people hadn't heard of. And who knows, maybe she believed the cockamamie story your grandmother told her, that girls couldn't get Valentine's. As if I was the kind of skunk who would leave a girl high and dry because of something that ran in her genes.”

I supposed he was right. My mother had gotten pregnant with me, then with my sister, because she had hoped beyond hope that she had been spared the disease that killed her father and older brothers. Blessed with two daughters, she had chosen to believe her mother's lie that girls didn't get Valentine's. After her children were all grown up, she had allowed herself to plan for a life that extended past her thirties. She defied her husband's objections about going back to school, knowing these were only for show (he paid for her tuition, and bought her a car so she could travel back and forth to Albany).

Then her memory started failing. Crossing the stage to receive her diploma, she stumbled and nearly fell. Other symptoms surfaced. She began to study genetics from necessity more than from love. She tried before she left to pass the torch on to me.