Pontoon (2 page)

She was a welcoming person in a family of wary observers. Let a strange car pull up in the driveway, she walked toward it smiling.
If someone died, she went straight to the house with a casserole for the survivors. But she could speak her mind. She went to the Town Council meeting when they took up a resolution to ban nudity, and she stood up, the lone dissenter, and said, “Why are you wasting time on this ridiculous law? So now Gary and LeRoy are supposed to get out their binoculars and watch for naked people? What does it matter to you if I go over to the Hidden Beach and go skinny-dipping? We all used to go over there—should I name names? Well, so what? If you’re offended by the sight of bare-naked people, then don’t go over there. And if you have a nice body and you want to show it off, more power to you.” They had never heard anyone speak in defense of nudity before.

When the school board took up a resolution that every child be required to say the Pledge of Allegiance she stood up and cried, “If you require me to go to church, then it’s no longer faith, and when you make somebody pledge allegiance to a flag that stands for freedom—you are just being stupid.” She sat down with a thud. The school board was stunned. Finally Mr. Halvorson moved that the resolution be referred to the executive committee for further study and everyone said “Aye” and it was gone and forgotten.

So she was memorable. And when people heard about her death, they stopped what they were doing and stood, hands at their sides, and felt her absence. A tall tree had crashed to the ground.

B
arbara found Evelyn's body, lying in bed, face up, green eyes staring vacantly at the ceiling, long tan arms at her sides, red lacquered nails, blue cotton blanket up to her waist, a copy of
Tale
of Two Cities
on the floor. Barbara is somewhat tightly wound, not the person you'd choose for the job of finding dead people. She shrieked, clutched at her mother's hand, shrank back from the bed, knocked a lamp off the bedside table, yelped and ran out of the room and into the kitchen where she tried to collect herself and took a deep breath and thought
homicide
and looked around for signs of violence. She stood very very still. Water dripped in the sink. She tightened the faucet. It stopped. She breathed deeply, once, twice, again, again, and told herself to be calm. Nobody had murdered Mother. Then she looked around for a drink.

In recent years Barbara had developed a crème de cacao problem. She liked to add it to her breakfast coffee; it put her in a gentler place. Took the edge off. She called it cocoa. It got her in the right frame of mind to go to work at the school cafeteria. She started to like work more. She sang a lot, songs from
Oklahoma
or
West Side Story
or
Music Man
, as she blended gallons of cheese
sauce in with tubs of macaroni. At night she switched to brandy and called up friends and relatives, weeping for bygone times, grieving for Lloyd and their lost marriage, grieving for daughter Muffy, wishing people could get along, wishing she had been a better mom, hoping for world peace, more openness and honesty and a cure for cancer.

“Sometimes I get the feeling that I was an adopted child,” she said. “I'm just so different from the rest of you.” She would weep on the phone, fall asleep on the couch, and wake up feeling lousy. Now, a little buzzed from morning coffee, she looked down at Evelyn and she cried out. “I'm not ready to let you go, I need you, Mommy! I need you too much!” A horrible silence. She was all alone.
She had no mom. No mom
. And she ran into Mother's living room and tried to re-start the old life by contemplating the old coral sofa, the old rocker, the red oriental rug, the painting of the horses in the meadow (
A Blessing
), the gold fringe on the lampshade, and then she went to the kitchen and climbed up on the stepstool to look for liquor, and found the Kahlúa. She got out a jelly glass, filled it up to the third fish and sang a song Mother had taught her.

Oh the horses stood around with their feet upon the ground and
who will wind my wristwatch when I'm gone? We feed the baby garlic
so we can find him in the dark, and a girl's best friend is her mother
.

Mother used to say, “A son is a son until he takes a wife but a daughter is a daughter all of her life,” and Barbara sure knew what that meant. Roger and Bennett went their sweet way from the time they learned to ride bikes but she had to stick around and peel potatoes and clean the bathrooms. Those two couldn't clean a bathroom if you put a pistol to their temples. They went gallivanting off to play tennis and lie around by the lake and eventually
off to the University and Mother was pleased if they dropped her a postcard now and then. They could do no wrong. But Barbara was held to a different standard: the assistant mother, the kitchen helper, the little manager, runner of errands.

Well, Mother was all hers now. It was just her and Mother in the house. Roger and Bennett knew nothing. Roger was in Santa Barbara, with his perky wife Gwen, hustling up customers for Milton & Merrill the hedge-fund giant, earning gold stars after his name, making pots of money, flying off to luxury spas and resorts, furnishing their second home in Vail. She would take her sweet time calling him. Maybe she would wait until Tuesday. Bennett was dragging his butt, broke in New York, fermenting in disappointment, a composer and for twenty-three years a security guard at a warehouse in Queens. He sat all night in a tiny office overlooking acres of appliances and wrote music at a computer. So far as she knew, he had never published anything except a few songs. He had written the first act of his opera,
Kitty
Hawk
, and then rewritten it four or five or six times, and he had an unfinished symphony. He had followed his dream in life and gotten lost. A great talent gone to waste, sob sob.

She finished the glass of Kahlúa and went back in the bedroom. “Well, you wanted to die in your sleep. So now you have. You got your wish. Good for you. I hope you're happy. And I hope you're not expecting a big funeral because frankly I'm not up for it. I don't know if you ever noticed, Mother, in your active life befriending everyone and traveling hither and yon, but your daughter has got a lot of problems. A lot.” She was feeling weepy. She thought of calling Oliver but he was working a double shift today. He'd just started clerking at Liberty Gas & Lube on I-94 over near Melrose, having gotten the shaft at 24-Hour Service in
St. Cloud, and she hated to interrupt him at work even though he said it was no problem. She just wanted somebody to tell: “My Mother, who I ate lunch with yesterday, is no more. My mama, she be daid.” The day before, Mother had sat in Barbara's backyard eating a big half-moon of watermelon, leaning forward, spitting seeds into the grass, juice dripping off her chin, and now she was dead. They'd eaten a salad together. Barbara had said, “Do you want me to drive you out to Moonlite Bay?” and Mother said no, Gladys or Margaret would drive.

“I worry about you driving late at night.”

“It's only five miles.”

And then she was critical of Barbara's salad. “Those tomatoes you buy at the store aren't tomatoes at all,” she said. “Ralph never seems to have good tomatoes anymore. These taste like they came from California. Why do that, when we have tomato growers around here? Why do people pay good money for bad food?” And Barbara said she thought the tomatoes were okay, so there was a little back-and-forth over that, and then Mother asked about Kyle, and they argued about whether Barbara was too hard on him, and Mother looked at her and said, “Well, what about you? Why don't you go back to school? You can't spend the rest of your life working in a school cafeteria.” Barbara said she liked the people there and the job gave her plenty of time to work on her art. And Mother rolled her eyes and Barbara said, “I know you don't care for my art but you don't have to roll your eyes.” Mother said, “Oh don't be so sensitive, I'm only kidding. Your life is your own. I'm happy for you. Wish you'd introduce me to your boyfriend, but that's up to you.” And she said that if Barbara wasn't up for company, then maybe she'd go home and come
back sometime when Barbara was in a better mood. “I was in a perfectly good mood until you criticized my salad and my son and my paintings,” said Barbara. “Well, if I'm upsetting you, I'm sorry,” said Mother, standing up to go. A thought balloon over her head, a trail of bubbles leading to it:
How did I get such a
child?
Barbara said, “Where are you going? You come over here for half an hour and run me through the wringer and then you hop up and go? Why can't we sit and converse like normal people?” “We're not normal people,” said Mother. “Nobody is. We're just us. And we are conversing, but you're in a prickly mood and also you've had too much to drink.” Barbara said, “And now you're going to start in on my drinking—” “No,” Mother said, “I'm going to go home and come back tomorrow when you're feeling better.” She took her salad plate toward the house and Barbara said, “You can't just keep walking away from me, Mother. You have to face me someday. I am who I am. I'm not Bennett and I'm not Roger. I'm me.” And Mother said, over her shoulder, not stopping, “I'm glad that you're you and I wish you a good day and I'll see you tomorrow.” She headed for the door, opened it, turned and smiled and said, “Pull up your socks, kiddo. And put on some lipstick.” Her valedictory speech. And out the back gate she went and that was Barbara's last sight of her, those long legs and khaki shorts and white blouse disappearing into the mudroom and now here were those long legs, cold and stiff, under a blanket.

She wished Mother hadn't walked away like that. She should've turned and come back and sat down and let Barbara tell her about Oliver and what a prize he was if only he would slim down. He did guy jobs like disposing of deceased animals and removing bats
from the fireplace and was much the same from day to day. You didn't go to bed with Mr. Chuckles and wake up with Lothar the Barbaric.

She opened the top drawer of the night stand and riffled through the clippings and postcards and aspirin packets and a poem on an index card—one of Mother's poems….

Not a great poem, if you ask me
, thought Barbara.
Sorry Mother
.

Under it was an envelope labeled
ARRANGEMENTS
. She opened it. The letter was typed on thin blue paper with
Par Avion
printed below and a French flag.

Barbara stared at the name. Raoul. Who he? Mother had never mentioned a Raoul. There were none in town. A boyfriend. Mother had a boyfriend. Good God.

The part about cremation and no eulogy didn't surprise her. Mother loathed funerals and that's why she always volunteered to make the lunch, to avoid the sermon and the crappy eulogy, which always went wide of the mark, usually pitched too high. She thought of Mother slipping off for a tryst in Branson with someone named Raoul. Barbara had been there once with Oliver. It was the only trip they had taken. A geezer resort where the face-lifted stars of yesteryear go on singing their hits like demented robots, eyes glazed, a sort of mortuary of pop music. And she thought Mother had gone to St. Louis to visit a cousin with a lingering illness. Mother lied. But Andy Williams? Mother loved choral music. She adored Handel's
Messiah
and Bach's
St. Matthew Passion
. She had never shown an interest in crooners before.

Barbara pulled the sheet up over Mother's face as she had seen
people do in movies. And she reached for the phone to call her son Kyle and she saw the tiny red light blinking on the answering machine. “You have one unheard message,” said the lady's voice. “Sent today at 1:29 a.m.” Then a click and a gravelly man's voice.