Carry the One (31 page)

“I was thinking of asking Mandy to come here to the hospital with me,” Nick said to Alice after a long while of silent consideration. “To kind of bring her more into my life.”

Alice didn’t bother to address this.

Nick and Alice were only alone in the hospital room at night. During the day, Loretta had a brisk traffic of visitors. Agents from her Re/Max
days. In these past few years of being no longer really a wife, but not actually widowed either, Loretta had blossomed in unexpected ways and had acquired a surprising new circle of acquaintances. Once Horace, a strenuous atheist, was no longer around to be withering about her religious impulses, she joined a Presbyterian congregation, which turned out to be a high-yield community in terms of corporal works of mercy. These women took “visit the sick” seriously. They showed up with soft pillowcases and verbena water they misted around Loretta’s head. They read to her from religious novels, books she would have ridiculed at any previous point in her life.

Another surprise: Despite all the years spent at the center of a hipster crowd, Loretta had belatedly taken up the corniest possible interest—ballroom dancing. Two dapper guys—one old, one disconcertingly only in his forties—had turned up as frequent bedside visitors these past days. From them Alice and Nick had learned of their mother’s reputation on the dance floor, particularly with the tango and West Coast swing. Alice thought this was kind of sweet, but it bugged the hell out of Carmen—Loretta having moved on, not to an old age filled with sorrow and regret, but rather to catching a second wind—twirling and dipping in God’s grace, and a little limelight.

Alice had come to Diane’s apartment. She’d brought along a video of
Lianna,
the old John Sayles movie. She thought this would come off as touching and innocent, that she could show Diane something of what it was like to come out when she, Alice, did. That this would serve as a bridge between them. Instead, she saw maybe twenty minutes in, that it was way too late to watch
Lianna
. When it got to a hideously embarrassing scene in a dingy dyke bar, everyone lurking and leering, Diane, like a good student, said, “This is kind of like Colonial Williamsburg. You know—pioneer folkways.”

Alice did not want Diane to be the appreciative tourist. She did not herself want to be the docent in the dirndl skirt. She flipped
Lianna
off with the remote and they got down to business.

A few afternoons later, Diane was naked on a creamy leather sofa, where she had been quite commanding and masterful for the past hour or so. Initially Alice had hoped to keep this affair absolutely superficial, but everything had moved rapidly in an unexpected direction. She had no understanding of her attraction to Dr. Pryzbicki. It seemed, by this late-ish point, that she should have a type or at least some guidelines for whom she would get into bed with. Instead she still wound up in situations like this one. Not as often as when she was younger, but still.

“I’d better get back to the hospital,” she said, pulling herself up against the arm of the sofa, dragging Diane, who was on top, along with her, the air around them thick with sex and sofa leather. “How do you think my mother’s doing?”

Diane cocked her head. “Oh boy. I’d say at this point, your mother is kind of beyond
doing
. We’re taking her off the protocol. How can I put this? You know those old doctor-patient jokes? Like the patient asks his doctor, ‘How am I doing?’ and the doctor says, ‘Well, I’m sorry but you only have ten to live.’ And the patient says, ‘Ten what?’ And the doctor says, ‘Nine. Eight. Seven—’” Diane looked at Alice earnestly with squinty eyes and said, “I hope I’m not speaking too frankly.”

Loretta slipped in and out of consciousness—back and forth between the uninteresting world of this hospital room and a pageant of scenes from her earliest years. She called out to her own mother, dead now for decades. It wasn’t a cry of distress, rather a joyous shout, as though she was asking her to watch how high she could make herself go on a swing set.

“She’s way back there,” Alice said to Carmen, who had finally come to the hospital. She was just back from three days in New Orleans. She had gotten pissed off watching Katrina on TV, and rallied Jean to rent a bread truck with her. They went to Costco and filled the truck with all the bottled water it could hold. Then they just drove down.

“It’s not an island in the Pacific, for Christ’s sake,” Carmen said. “It’s like two states away.”

And apparently they were able to get through and unload the water someplace where it did some good. Rob was really upset. Carmen did this without telling him in advance, just left a note. He said you couldn’t be married and be a unilateral operator. Carmen said her political and social work were part of who she was. “I can’t see something so wrong and not do anything about it. I’d start not liking myself.”

She had come to the hospital for Alice. Through the revelations of Jungian analysis and studying the texts of her dreams, Carmen had dispatched Loretta to a place where she didn’t have to expend energy hating her. Her way of talking about Loretta now was to damn her lightly with the faintest praise possible. “Well, she didn’t drown us in the bathtub. She didn’t leave us on the median strip on the highway,” she would say. Or, “She didn’t sell us on the black market for parts like that Russian woman with her grandson.”

Alice gave it her best shot. “Look, I know she could have done better. But she was trapped under Horace’s thumb. Women in her generation had to hitch their wagon to a guy they thought would take them someplace. You know about her childhood. They didn’t have enough chairs for everyone at dinner. Some of the kids had to stand. She slept in the basement, by the furnace for warmth; she and Aunt Ella.”

But Carmen was not impressed with the lack of chairs or the basement sleeping. She didn’t find these extenuating circumstances. “She looks so harmless. Imagine that,” Carmen said now, as they watched Loretta wave across the backyard of her girlhood.

Alice was in the shower with Diane. They’d been there awhile, since Alice followed Diane home in the morning when her shift was over. The water had run down from hot to lukewarm. They were by now well beyond frolicsome lathering and rinsing.

“Don’t stop,” Alice said.

“I might have to, though,” Diane said. “Stopping might be the best thing for you.”

“No,” Alice said in a voice so small and distant she could hear it echo vaguely off the shower tiles. Alice was falling into something soft-focus and emotion-bearing with Dr. Pryzbicki, something she could not have predicted. She had been toppled by kindness. Outside of bed, or the shower, where Diane withheld to put a little spin on things, she was generous in a bounding way. It had only been two weeks, but already there had been small presents—unusual cut flowers from a Japanese shop on Belmont, a book of poetry.
Autobiography of Red
. But also a whole new category of sideswiping gesture. Like yesterday, on her day off, she asked to borrow Alice’s car and brought it back washed, waxed, oil changed, tires rotated.

Diane wasn’t any sort of person Alice ever thought she’d be interested in. Alice had spent most of her adulthood longing for Maude or falling for and recovering from adventures with Maude surrogates—good-looking, lightly cruel, mercurial women, all of whom seemed initially different from one another, movies in a darkened theater, opening against the backdrop of one or another exotic locale, stories so filled with potential she could become euphoric imagining herself into them. By their endings, though, these stories turned out to just be slightly different versions of the same story—an essentially dull tale pumped up with bursts of emotional squandering. Still, all along this bumpy way, the idea of Diane had never occurred to Alice. She hadn’t considered someone serious and constant, someone who wouldn’t make her nervous.

Diane knew nothing about art. Her apartment was decorated with pre-framed prints from Bed, Bath & Beyond. Parisian boulevard in the living room, water lilies over the bed, giant radish in the kitchen. When they met, she had no idea who Alice was. When Alice said “painter,” Diane at first thought roller and scaffold. Even now she didn’t really understand that in another—albeit small—part of the universe, Alice was famous. And, if she did understand, she wouldn’t care. She would just be happy Alice gets to do what she likes.

Diane wasn’t an oncologist, only rotating through on her way to becoming an emergency room doctor. She liked the frontline aspect of doing good. She also wanted to take care of Alice. If you’d asked Alice a couple of weeks ago, this wouldn’t have sounded appealing. Now, she wasn’t so sure.

When Loretta died, she did it so quickly no one could get there in time. Alice, who had gone home to get a night of something better than chair sleep, got a call at 3:30 in the morning from Diane, who was on duty and had just signed the death certificate. Alice called Nick but there was no answer, then tried Carmen, but just got voicemail. Rob battled insomnia with a white noise machine set to Tropical Rain Forest; once the machine was on it was raining like crazy in Brazil and you couldn’t reach them. Which left Alice heading down to the hospital alone. She expected to find Loretta in some grim basement morgue, slid by an attendant from a wall cabinet on a steel body tray, her skin gray eliding into blue. In fact, her mother was still in her deluxe room, in the bed with the mahogany headboard. The machines and bags of fluids were gone, though, there being nothing left to monitor or measure. Loretta’s face held no expression at all. She didn’t look peaceful or angelic, only as though she was off somewhere else and had left herself behind.

Alice took her mother’s cooling hand and waited for something significant and terrifying to open up around them. What she saw instead was that death wasn’t going to offer much of anything, just reshape the longing for Loretta that Alice had always carried. She would remain as elusive in death as she had been in life; missing her would just seem more appropriate. Maybe Alice had been looking for the wrong person, maybe the mother she had sought for so long had turned a corner in the supermarket when Alice was small and the person she caught up with in produce was a woman who was willing to pitch in a little, but would always remain a stranger.

Alice went over to Nick’s apartment, buzzed twice, then let herself in with her key. It was always a little scary going in. Today a familiar bayberry aroma filled the place, the product of a large candle on the scarred Formica counter that separated the living room from the kitchen. The ceiling above the designated candle-burning spot was black with thick, furry soot.

Nick was sitting on the sofa in front of his TV, which was even larger than his old one, its picture gigantic and blurry in an aquatic way. Nick had bought it off QVC. “I was lucky to get it,” he’d told her. “They only had twelve left by the time I got through.”

He looked over his shoulder at Alice from a vast painless place.

“This, by the way, is a great movie.” He nodded toward the TV, although the DVD—she recognized it as
Bound
—was skipping, breaking down from Gina Gershon into a thousand pieces of confetti, then reassembling once again into Gina Gershon. Her lips, magnified on the large screen, were nearly the size of throw pillows.

“Listen. Mom died.”

“I know. Your friend the doctor called. She is a very persistent ringer.” And then he went silent for so long Alice began to think he was preparing to offer something important. But when he finally spoke, it was to say, “Do you want an ice cream treat? I have tons in the freezer.”

She got a Nutty Buddy and took the chair across from him. “I love these,” she said when she was halfway through. She didn’t realize she was crying until her face was completely wet.

Loretta wanted to be sent off from a funeral home in Old Town. She left instructions about everything. She wanted to be laid out in an open casket, which was disturbing to Carmen.

“Who does this anymore?” she said to Alice as they sat in Chapel Number Two. “I mean outside of Sicily?”

“Who cares, though, really?” Alice countered. “All her chums can see her one last time. And she looks pretty good. I mean, they did a nice job. The makeup and all.”

“What are you even saying?” Carmen said. “She looks dead. I don’t even know what to say about her now.” And then all of a sudden, Carmen was weeping, then grabbing tissues from one of the many boxes set out all around the room to manage exactly this sort of flaring and unbidden emotion. She had clearly surprised herself.

“Well,” Alice said, borrowing Carmen’s part, “I guess we could say she didn’t lock us in the cellar and make us eat dirt.”

They looked around the room, which was decorated to resemble a small church.

“Where’s you-know-who?” Carmen said. Nick’s absence had just occurred to her.

“Indisposed. And for once, I don’t have any emotion to spare for his relapse.”

“You couldn’t get him to come over?”

“I tried. You could try if you want. Go over there. I don’t think he’ll straighten out, but you could have an ice cream treat.”

The funeral home asked for photos of the deceased, which had been slipped into frames and now cozily cluttered the tables in the foyer of the chapel. The one Alice had them put on the prayer cards was a shot of Loretta in her fifties, her deep-tanning years. Her teeth and the whites of her eyes popped out, as though electrically illuminated.

The first of the mourners began to drift in. The Old Town bohemian crowd from the early days of her marriage was present in faint outline—a man in a beret and a wispy ponytail, a woman in black chaps and a bolero jacket, a wide hat with a heavy veil. Alice recognized her; it was Cindy Beecham. Larry and Giselle Zorn arrived, natty and stylish, although the style was thirty years out of date. Their glasses were huge. Others of the old gang were absent because of illness, or due to being already dead themselves. Horace wasn’t invited; he no longer remembered who Loretta was so her death would mean nothing to him.

The largest contingent of those in attendance was Loretta’s new replacement friends—women from her church as well as the snappy dance partners. Behind them Alice spotted an aunt and windbag uncle she would just as soon duck.