Saul and Patsy (20 page)

He slept on a cot in their study, close enough to the computer so that he could hear its internal fan whirring all night in sleep mode, almost covering the sounds of Buzz and Sarah’s snoring and snorts and conversations in the next room. Still childless, they hadn’t yet learned how to muffle themselves. In the corner, Buzz and Sarah’s African gray parrot, Jack, muttered and scrabbled about in his cage. The bird had acquired a fiendish expertise for imitating ringing telephones and dripping faucets, and in moments of bravado would imitate Sarah’s asthma wheeze, allergy-related coughing, and gasps during intercourse. “Shut up,” Saul would say, and within hours the bird started to answer, “Shut up.”

At breakfast, Buzz asked Saul whether there wasn’t something he— Saul—wanted to talk about, and Saul shook his head. “I’m sort of in this
box,
and I can’t exactly open it up, but I’m okay,” he said. “That’s all. It’s not serious. Don’t worry about me.” He went back to his bagel and the sports page. He didn’t mention Gordy Himmelman, feeling that it would be an imposition. Too long living in the Midwest had made him a practitioner of self-effacing obtuse cheerfulness, he realized.

Finally, after calling to make sure she’d be there, he borrowed Buzz and Sarah’s car and drove over to Bethesda to his mother’s house. He had grown up in this house and was happy to think of it as no longer
his,
or as
home,
or as a place where he would willingly stay for more than a few hours at a time. Standing on the sidewalk, Saul inspected the lawn and the front garden: they were carefully tended, the edges of the grass properly clipped, the lilac at the side of the house perfectly trimmed, the geranium in its pot on the front stoop well-watered. Pansies filled the flower bed. Somebody was indeed taking care of his mother, or of her lawn, lush and green as it was—prodigal and green and carnal, in its second adolescence, pubic, procreative. After he rang the doorbell, the door opened, and his mother presented herself. “Ah, the weary traveler. You like it?” his mother asked, glancing around at nothing in particular. That was Delia: she had always asked him questions that were too vague to answer.

Saul smiled at her and shrugged. “Very much.” Carrying his overnight bag, he ambled up to her and hugged her.

On close inspection, he could see that something had indeed happened to her. Delia was not herself anymore. She had been divested of her affectations and stripped of her usual ornaments. He had prepared himself for more of her mustard-gas perfume, more girlishness, a bonanza of bracelets and amber necklaces, but she wasn’t wearing any bracelets or necklaces, she had stopped dyeing her hair, and she had done away with the bloody-looking fingernail polish. She just stood there, wearing a new simplicity. She was almost elegant. “Sweetie,” she said, patting him on the cheek. “It’s good to see you. I’m
so
sorry about that boy. Put your suitcase inside in the foyer and let’s go to the supermarket. We need some groceries for dinner.”

Behind the wheel of his mother’s Camry, negotiating traffic, his newly remodeled mother beside him, Saul suddenly remembered why he disliked the suburbs and had developed an affection for dusty, luckless midwestern cities tucked away inside the folds of the map. The drivers here in suburban Maryland were cunning and ruthless. They engaged in savage tailgating. They were overachieving supervisors in their professional lives and now they were doing their best to overachieve behind the wheel. They wore their successes on their huge muscular sheet-metal fenders. Darwinian, emotionally Republican even if they were registered Democrats, they had acquired German sedans or American SUVs that looked like staff cars for Rommel, or they had huge spotless V-8 pickup trucks with nothing, ever, in the cargo bed—that would spoil the effect, like a suntan that ended at the shirt collar—and most of them drove with one hand, the other hand on their cell phones relaying news to the home-front on how the battle was going. Domestic life in the suburbs, simple trips to the mall, had shifted to a war footing, the drivers so high and mighty behind the wheel that they looked down on any sedan inhabited by civilians.

At the green light, when Saul failed to accelerate immediately, the woman behind him, driving a burgundy F-250, honked at him, and Saul flashed her the finger and began yelling helplessly and with great enraged enthusiasm. She zoomed past him in the left lane, lowered the passenger-side electric window, shouted “Dickhead!” at him, and raced forward. On her truck’s bumper there was a diversity-rainbow sticker. She was very beautiful. He couldn’t chase her: he was driving his mother, his ancient enemy, to the supermarket. Besides, they were underdefended in the Camry, the sort of car driven by worker bees.

“I wish you’d calm down, Saul,” his mother said a few minutes later, after he had flipped the bird to another driver who had first tailgated him and then cut him off. They entered the parking lot for the supermarket, and Saul began the desperate search for a spot. “You’re awfully tense this morning.” She patted him on the knee. “Why don’t you park over there?” She pointed to a space. Saul ignored her. He parked one row farther off, in an opening that he had found for himself. “I see you’ve acquired a bit of road rage,” Delia said, after he stopped and put on the emergency brake with a furious gesture. “I don’t remember that in you before. Don’t go blaming me for that.”

“Oh, I would never blame you for anything,” Saul lied, dropping the keys into the pocket of his leather jacket. “It’s the drivers here. And when did I ever have any equanimity? Well, come on.”

He walked slightly behind her to the doors of the market and noticed how his mother’s physical movements had taken on a pensiveness that she’d never displayed before. It wasn’t an effect of aging; it was the consequence of seriousness, of something profound that had happened to her and had taken root. She most likely couldn’t discuss it with him. Having secrets apparently gave people dignity. Watching her, he felt amazement: his mother had acquired an inner life. She had warmed up. And all from a boy lover. He took her arm as gently as he could, and she smiled at him. “Hi, Saul,” she said, stepping up to the curb, as if he had just arrived. “How are you?”

He told her in his blandest voice that he was fine, and as he grabbed a shopping cart inside the automatic doors, she said, “You know, I’m fine, too,” but her face occasionally displayed brief expressions of resignation followed by inappropriate private smiles. Her head nodded, quick flicks. Saul could see that she was carrying on a lengthy inner conversation. She was lying to him; she wasn’t fine at all, of course, but sprightliness had once been in her nature, so she would try to maintain it.

“What?” he asked.

“What ‘what’?” she answered. “Grab some of that romaine lettuce, would you?” He did as he was asked. Music drifted down like plastic icicles from speakers in the ceiling: “Mona Lisa” in a string arrangement. “Do you like green peppers in your salad? Tomatoes? I don’t remember.” Still smiling, she added, “It’s been such a long time. After all, I’m not your mother anymore.” Planted near the produce, she gazed at him, examining him for one second too long. “Sometimes when you stand like that you look like your father.” She made an all-purpose gesture. “Too bad you didn’t inherit his sense of humor.”

“We’re having another child,” he said, trying to forestall any discussion of what he had or had not inherited. “Patsy and I,” he clarified.

“Oh, yes, Patsy told me.” Saul dropped the peppers into the cart, as his mother beamed. “That’s so wonderful. They never arrive when you expect them to, you know—children. By the way, have you talked to your brother lately?” She straightened herself, cleared her throat with a noise like a sheep, and pushed the cart ahead of him, toward the meat counter. She picked up one of the T-bone steaks inside its shrink-wrap and examined it closely, as if, Saul thought, for an infection. “He makes all this money and then he goes out on those extreme sports, or whatever they’re called. Rock climbing and such. So
aggressive
. At least he’s not moody. When you get into these moods, Saul, I wish you’d go into therapy, or at least get a hobby the way your brother does.”

“In Five Oaks? That’s a good one. You’ve gotten kind of moody yourself, Ma.”

“Me? You still eat meat, don’t you? You haven’t turned into one of these vegetarians?” She dropped two of the steaks into the cart and gazed down the grocery aisle toward the dairy products. She didn’t seem to want to look at him. “
I’m
not sitting up watching television and sitting around all day, Saul.
I’m
not making trips all over the country.”

“My seeing you doesn’t have a purpose? Seeing my mother? That’s a hell of a thing to say. It’s summertime. Besides, I’m not in your way. You don’t have a job or anything.”

She banged the shopping cart into his hip, as a nudge. “Well, I know you do have a purpose, being here. And I certainly do have a job. I
work.
You just don’t know what it is that I do.
Do
you? No, you don’t. I go to an office four times a week, Saul, where I . . .” She nodded to herself. “Oh, never mind. It’s nice, that I have a job, a
serious
job, and you don’t know what it is. You don’t keep yourself informed. Don’t have a ghost of a clue, do you, honey? You don’t ask.” She turned around to look at him. “What do you mean, I’ve gotten moody?”

“I’m your son,” Saul said. “I can tell.” Shoppers passed them quickly. The two of them, mother and adult son, were becalmed in a sea of shoppers passing by them in waves. “So what’s this job? What’s going on with you, Ma?”

Delia had been looking straight ahead of her, and all at once she flinched. “What’s going on with me? I’m hanging by a thread. Oh, look. Somebody fell.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Up there.” She pointed toward the dairy products and the case for frozen foods. “Somebody fell up there.”

Saul looked in the direction where she was pointing and saw a man on the floor. He was reasonably well dressed, and Saul was quickly ashamed of himself for thinking that people who fell to the floor in public places were always shabby. Anyone could fall to the floor. Saul himself could do so; he was quite capable of it. The man had apparently slipped on some wet linoleum tiles—there was a standing yellow hazard marker just off to the left with a little silhouette figure of a falling person on it—and by the time Saul got there, being careful of his own footing, the man was already on his knees, and then, with Saul’s help, on his feet. “My mistake,” the man said, in apology. Next to where he had fallen there stood, in the center aisle, a pyramid display of canned tomatoes with their brightly dark red labels, and after the man thanked Saul, he brushed himself off and went on his way, carrying a frozen dinner he had picked up from the floor. Saul stayed where he was. He could not take his eyes off the display. The red of the labels was magnetic, visually fixating. Tomato cans! He was unable to look at anything else. People and things passed by him. More bland music of some sort drizzled down from the ceiling speakers—small, drabby, synthetic music—as Saul felt himself sucked wholly into the blood-red colors on the cans.

When he finally came to his senses, his mother was beside him. “A mitzvah,” she said. “Good for you. What’s with those cans, Saul?”

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “They look like . . . never mind. Let’s go.”

Ten minutes later, at the checkout line, his mother turned toward him and smiled again. “Oh, I know it’s hard doing this with me. It’s no fun, is it, all grown up and still going to the grocery store with your mother. I just thought it would give us something to do.”

Saul unloaded the grocery cart, lost in thought, watching his mother take out her checkbook. She did it with a restrained bossiness. Down through the years, she had carried on her life without altering it very much for Saul’s, or Howie’s, benefit. Her feminism was personal and private and therefore eccentric, and she had formed the habit of resenting men as a class because her husband had died and left her alone with two sons. Solitude had made her flirty at first, and then impersonal. Getting anything personal out of her was like trying to open a tuna fish can with your thumbs. Saul and Howie had their worlds, she had hers. And the boys shared a guilt with their father, because, one by one, they would grow up and abandon her, which was what males did. Either they died or they took off. In Delia’s version of things, male adulthood was disloyalty by its very nature. Even providing her with another grandchild wouldn’t close that wound.

No wonder a sweet and devoted teenaged lover had knocked the stuffing out of her.

Watching her pay for her groceries, Saul thought of his mother’s dutifulness. She had been good about taking Saul, and then Howie, to Little League practice after Saul’s father had died, but her heart wasn’t in it, in any of those male activities, those
sports
. Howie’s sickliness had given her a cause to preoccupy her, but her sons didn’t have anything to give her in return. But now, some shift had taken place in her. Her heart had been stripped bare. Sympathies had opened up. Suddenly she was out of character. In midlife she had become someone else. And she deserved everything she got, all the rewards of feeling, Saul thought, especially if she had lost her heart to this kid.

Carrying the groceries out to the car, feeling brave, Saul said, “How’s your love life, Ma? Any prospects?”

“Why? Did Patsy say something to you?”

“No, in fact, she didn’t.”

Saul was putting the grocery bags in the trunk, but he could tell that his mother was checking his face for deceit. She had an internal psycho-galvanometer with Saul and could detect his polite lies a continent away. Her right eyebrow went up, like that of a food critic, and she ran her fingers through her hair. “Yes, there is somebody,” she said. “But I can’t talk about it.”

She waited at the passenger-side door for Saul to unlock and open it for her, which he did, practicing his manners. Back behind the wheel, he asked her why not.

“Because some things you can’t talk about,” Delia said. She was getting grumpy. She harumphed and squirmed in the seat. “All your generation does is talk about sex all the time. Some things should be left to themselves.”