The New Yorker Stories (69 page)

Yesterday I visited my mother in her new apartment in Alexandria. She was afraid of crime in downtown Washington and thought she should relocate. Her nurse-companion came with her, a kindhearted woman named Zalla, who attended the school of nursing at American University two nights a week and every summer. When she got her nursing degree, Zalla intended to return to her home, Belize, where she was going to work in a hospital. The hospital was still under construction. Building had to be stopped when the architect was accused of embezzling; then the hurricane struck. But Zalla had faith that the hospital would be completed, that she would eventually graduate from nursing school, and that—though this went unsaid—she would not be with my mother forever. My mother has emphysema and diabetes, and needs someone with her. Zalla cooks and washes and does any number of things no one expects her to do, and during the day she’s never off her feet. At night she watches James Bond movies over and over on my mother’s VCR. My mother sits in the TV room with her, rereading Dickens. She says the James Bond movies provide wonderful soundtracks for the stories: Carly Simon singing “Nobody Does It Better” in
The Spy Who Loved Me
as my mother’s reading about Mr. Pickwick.

Anyway, what happened was in no way Zalla’s fault, but she was tortured by guilt. Days after the incident I’m going to tell about, which I heard of when I visited, Zalla was still upset.

That Monday, my mother had checked into Sibley Hospital for a day of tests. In the afternoon, there was a knock on the door and Zalla looked out of the peephole and saw Little Thomas. She’d met him several times through the years, so of course she let him in. He said he was there to return some dishes my mother had let him borrow when he was setting up housekeeping. He also wanted to say goodbye, because he was moving out of the apartment he’d been sharing with other people in Landover, Maryland, and was headed down to the Florida Keys to tend bar. Then he worked the conversation around to asking Zalla for a loan: fifty dollars, which he’d send back as soon as he got to Key West and opened a bank account and deposited some checks. She had thirty-some dollars and gave him everything she had, minus the bus fare she needed to get to Sibley Hospital that evening. He asked for a sheet of paper so he could write a goodbye note to my mother, and Zalla found him a notepad. He sat at the kitchen table, writing. It didn’t occur to her to stand over him. She unpacked the dishes and loaded them into the dishwasher, and then tidied up in the TV room. He wrote and wrote. He was writing my mother a nasty note, telling her that through therapy he had come to realize that the family perpetuated harmful myths, and that no one had ever chosen to “come clean” about his father’s death, because his father had actually died of pneumonia, not from the fall off a wagon. He told her how horrifying it had been to see his father slipping away in the hospital, and he blamed her and Etta Sue for always discussing Cousin Pete’s last moments when they talked about his father’s death. “Fact is, lightning impressed you more than simple pneumonia,” he wrote. He also thought they should have talked more to him about his father’s accomplishments. He thought they should have told about his father’s love for him. He made no mention of his sister Lilly, from whom he was estranged. He folded the note and put it under the saltshaker, and then he mixed himself a cup of instant cocoa and left, taking the mug he was drinking from.

Zalla was nervous. She thought he might have been drinking, though his breath didn’t smell of alcohol. He’d gone to the bathroom while he was there, so Zalla went into the bathroom to make sure everything was all right. It was, but she still had an uneasy feeling. It wasn’t until that evening, when she left for the hospital to escort my mother home, that she saw the black felt-pen graffiti on the wall in the downstairs hallway: stick people with corkscrew hair like Martians’ antennae, and a quickly scrawled
SCREW YOU BLOWING THIS JOINT
. She was horrified, and at first she thought she’d keep quiet about Little Thomas’s visit—just pretend it was all a mystery—but she knew that was wrong and she’d have to make a full disclosure.

By the time I heard the story, Zalla and my mother had agreed he was probably drunk—or, worse, on drugs—and that he was a coward to pretend to confront my mother, when all he did was write a note. He also hadn’t had the nerve to face his own mother, who was still living on Twentieth Street, and tell her that he was moving away. Zalla kept quiet about the thirty dollars, but the next morning she confessed that, too. In with the dishes he’d brought back were several strange, gold-bordered plates my mother had not given him; neither she nor Zalla knew exactly what to make of that. Both feared, irrationally, that someone would now come for the plates. They seemed to understand, though, that Little Thomas was gone and wouldn’t be heard from for some time, if ever. Zalla remained afraid of him, in the abstract. She said he’d crept around like a burglar. That gave my mother and me a good laugh, because he’d been sneaky all his life. Good that he spared Mother’s bathroom wall, I joked: bad enough that they’d had to call the management to apologize and to arrange to have the hallway repainted.

While Zalla watched
Goldfinger
, my mother led me into her bedroom and told me one of the Dark Secrets she’d never before revealed. It turned out she had always feared Little Thomas would do something really awful, because he had done something very bad as a child. My mother had been furious, but she had never told on him, because she was embarrassed at her own fury, and also because she felt that Little Thomas’s demons tortured him enough.

She asked whether I remembered the silhouettes. I did remember them, vaguely, though I had to be reminded that they’d once hung on a satin ribbon in Etta Sue’s living room. I remembered them from later on, when they’d hung below the light above the bed in my mother’s bedroom, attached to the same ribbon. There had also been one of Lilly, as a baby, and another of Punkin Puppy, in separate frames. The three framed silhouettes on the ribbon had been of Thomas Sr., Etta Sue, and the man who, Etta Sue told my mother, had cut the silhouettes. Etta Sue explained this somewhat humorous fact by saying that the silhouette cutter was going to throw his self-portrait away—he probably did it the way secretaries practice their typing, or something—and that she had rescued it from the trash. Little Thomas had destroyed
his
silhouette before it got into the frame, and though Etta Sue always meant to have another one cut, Little Thomas wouldn’t sit still a second time. My mother shook her head. She said that she supposed the silhouette cutter’s self-portrait was sort of like Alfred Hitchcock’s including himself in his own films, though that wasn’t a good comparison, because Etta Sue had hung it up, not the man himself.

When Etta Sue was forced to move out of her house and into the Twentieth Street apartment after Thomas Sr.’s death, she had to discard many things. The furniture my mother could understand, but parting with so many personal possessions had seemed to her a mistake. When the ribbon with the framed silhouettes went into the trash, my mother grabbed it out and said she would keep it for Etta Sue until she felt better. And Etta Sue had given her the strangest look. First shocked, then sad, my mother thought. And in all the years my mother had the silhouettes hung in her bedroom, Etta Sue never mentioned them, although she did eventually ask for Thomas Sr.’s shaving mug back, and for the framed picture of herself and her husband taken at a Chinese restaurant on their first anniversary.

But the point of the story, my mother said, was this: One weekend a few months after Thomas Sr.’s death, she was taking care of Little Thomas and Lilly, and Little Thomas had gone into the bedroom while all the rest of us were in the backyard and he had taken the silhouettes out of the frames and cut the noses off. Then he slipped them all back into their frames and rehung them. It was days before my mother noticed—everyone with his or her nose chopped off, plus Punkin Puppy, earless.

She hurried right over to Little Thomas’s school and waited for him to get out. He walked home, but that day he didn’t go anywhere before she confronted him. By her own account, she grabbed the tip of his nose and squeezed it, asking him how he thought he’d like being without his nose. Then she grabbed his ears and asked him if he thought he might like to spend the rest of his life not hearing, too. She crouched and made him look her in the eye and tell her why he’d done it. It was amazing that someone didn’t notice her making such a scene and come over, she said. Little Thomas gasped when she pulled him around and shook him by his shoulders, but he never cried.

He had done it, he told her, because the faces in the frames were miniature black ghosts, there to haunt people. He disfigured them because they were ghost monsters with special powers of sneaking inside people. If he got rid of the black ghosts, cut them up a little, they would become white ghosts, with no special power.

My mother was so horrified she couldn’t stand. He had given a quite specific, terribly upsetting answer, and she had no idea what response to make, because if he really thought those things he was mad. That would make it the first incidence of real madness in the family. She was 90 percent sure he was telling her what he really believed, but she also thought there was some small chance he might be having her on. She stayed there quite a while, weak in the knees, staring into his face, looking for more information.

“You think I’d care if I didn’t have a nose?” he said. “
I
wouldn’t care if I didn’t have a nose or a mouth or eyes. I wish the sperm had never gone into the egg. I wouldn’t mind if there was no me, and you wouldn’t either.”

My mother remembered being surprised that he knew about sex—that he knew such words as “sperm” and “egg.” She didn’t remember what she said to him next, but it had something to do with how she understood that he was very upset that his father was dead and had disappeared, but that he mustn’t confuse that with thinking his father didn’t love him.

Little Thomas broke away from her. “You stupid fool,” he said. She remembered that distinctly: “You stupid fool.”

After Little Thomas’s father’s death, my mother now suddenly reminded me, someone courted Etta Sue for a bit, but eventually faded away. In retrospect, my mother said, she thought it might quite possibly have been (“Now, don’t laugh,” she said) the milkman. Because, come to think of it, why else—unless she was a little embarrassed—would Etta Sue refuse to let anyone in the family know whom she was seeing? Also, Nat the Milkman had been a Sunday painter, so perhaps he had also cut silhouettes.

“Say nothing of this to Zalla,” my mother said. It was something she had begun to say increasingly, as an afterthought, in recent years—or perhaps as an end to each of her stories, not as an afterthought, really.

I kissed her cheek and gave her hand a squeeze, turning off her bedside lamp with my free hand. It was early evening and dark. We were in autumn, the season when Thomas Sr. had slipped from high atop the mounded hay—slipped in slow motion, compared to the way his cousin Pete had been struck by lightning.

That was the past. I imagined the future: the graffiti figures that had already disappeared in the downstairs hallway, whited out by a paint roller. Then I thought about the hospital in Belize, to which for all intents and purposes that paint roller could travel like a comet, to whiten the drywall that had at long last been installed in the corridors of the new hospital. Zalla would be standing there, her starched white nurse’s uniform contrasting with her dark skin, and in a blink my mother would be dead, quite unexpectedly—gone from her white-sheeted bed to the darkness, as Zalla paused in her busy day to remember us, a nice American family.

The Women of This World

T
he dinner was going to be good. Dale had pureed leeks and salsify to add to the pumpkin in the food processor—a tablespoon or so of sweet vermouth might give it a little zing—and as baby-girl pink streaked through the gray-blue sky over the field, she dropped a CD into the player and listened matter-of-factly to Lou Reed singing matter-of-factly, “I’m just a gift to the women of this world.”

By now her husband, Nelson, would be on his way back from Logan, bringing his stepfather, Jerome, and Jerome’s girlfriend, Brenda—who had taken the shuttle from New York, after much debate about plane versus train versus driving—for the annual (did three years in a row make something annual?) pre-Thanksgiving dinner. They could have come on Thanksgiving, but Didi, Jerome’s ex (and Nelson’s mother), was coming that day, and there was no love lost between them. Brenda didn’t like big gatherings, anyway. Brenda was much younger than Jerome. She used to nap half the afternoon—because she was shy, Jerome said—but lately her occupation had become glamorous and she had quit teaching gym at the middle school to work as a personal trainer, and suddenly she was communicative, energized, radiant—if that wasn’t a cliché for women in love.

Dale turned on the food processor and felt relieved as the ingredients liquified. It wasn’t that the food processor hadn’t always worked—when she placed the blade in the bottom correctly, that is—but that she feared it wouldn’t work. She always ran through a scenario in which she’d have to scoop everything out and dump it in the old Waring blender that had come with the rented house in Maine and that didn’t always work. With blenders so cheap, she amazed herself by not simply buying a new one.