They May Not Mean To, but They Do: A Novel (17 page)

When Danny came to dinner, he always said, “I’ll bring a roast chicken from Gourmet Garage so you won’t have to cook.”

Cook? She could barely recall when she had last cooked. She did make toast. She sometimes boiled an egg. But she would not be cooking Danny a nice dinner like a proper mother, like a proper hostess, she didn’t have the strength, he was right about that. She decided she would make the table look pretty. She would use the silver. She would light candles.

She bent down and pulled out the bottom drawer in the kitchen cabinet, where the tablecloths were kept, then stood up holding a fresh bright white embroidered cloth and banged her head on a cabinet door she’d left open. She cried from pain and frustration, but forced herself on, into the dining room, to spread the cloth. But how could she spread the beautiful white cloth? The dining-room table was covered with mail and file folders; there was a tray with an egg-stained plate and a pink jammy crust of bread; large bottles of pills dozed on their sides like sea lions; magazines and catalogues and unread newspapers had slithered out from piles that had then collapsed and fanned across yet another egg-stained plate. A pile of bills, three piles of bills, each topped with a yellow Post-it that said
Urgent.
Joy sat at the table crying and trying to decipher the bills. They made no sense. She began to dial Molly’s number to tell her the dining-room table was a mess, as if Molly should fly in from California to straighten it up, then caught herself and hung up.

*   *   *

She choked when Danny came to dinner. A piece of chicken flew out of her throat and landed on her plate, slimy and colorless.

The sounds were hideous, like a crow’s, like a gasping dying crow’s.
KEH-KEH-KEH
. She tried to drink water. No air came in, no air went out, her throat was closed and squeezing and pushing, and out came the piece of chicken in a gush of unswallowed liquid. It lay there in a pool of water like a tiny dead baby.

Danny had been pounding her on the back. Now he stood beside her staring at the lump of flesh in its little pond. “Jesus.”

Joy patted her mouth with her napkin, then spread it over her plate, covering the chicken.

“Jesus,” he said again. He stroked her hair. “Mom, can you talk?”

Joy put her head in her hands. She could talk. But what was there to say?

*   *   *

“So how’s Mom?” Molly asked Daniel later that night.

“She says she’s okay. She got a piece of chicken stuck in her throat. It was disgusting. And scary.”

“But she’s okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. You know her. She’s a trooper.”

*   *   *

“Daniel said you seemed pretty good,” Molly said to her mother the next day.

“We had chicken.”

“Are you getting out at all? You need to get out, see your friends.”

“Oh no. Not in this weather.”

“Aren’t you going stir-crazy?”

“You know, I’m a very busy person, Molly.” Joy gazed at the datebooks splayed in front of her on the dining-room table, one of them so old the cover hung off like an empty sleeve, an amputee’s empty sleeve. “Between losing things and looking for things I’ve lost and going to the bathroom,” she said, “well, the day just isn’t long enough.”

“You’re funny.”

“I’m not trying to be.”

Molly laughed. “You really are funny. Now make a date with a friend. With Natalie. Go to the 92nd Street Y the minute it gets warm enough, okay? I’m so proud of you, Mom! Daniel’s right. You really are a trooper.”

“She’s so strong,” Molly and Daniel told each other.

“Of course she misses Dad,” they added, “we all do, but what a terrible weight she’s been carrying all these years. Now, finally, she can have some time for herself.”

“I can talk to her now, really talk to her,” they said. “About me.”

She seemed to need them more than ever, which was gratifying, but she didn’t seem to need them too much, which was more gratifying still.

*   *   *

When the weather warmed up and the ice turned to broad rivers of slush, Joy did try going to the 92nd Street Y, to a poetry reading.

“Count me out,” said Natalie. “Poetry is depressing at our age.”

“Why at our age particularly?”

“Because everything is depressing at our age.”

The Y was dark and frequented by women who did not bother about their hair. The screaming children running in and out, who should have cheered her (that had always been one of her theories, that the generations should mix), were unsettling. She could feel her irregular heart beating more irregularly than usual and she went home.

*   *   *

When Daphne got back from Florida, Joy went out again to meet her at the coffee shop. They had not seen each other since Aaron’s funeral.

Joy said, “I miss Aaron. And I don’t like being alone.”

“The first year is the worst. Then it calms down to a dull roar.”

“How’s your boyfriend from down there?” Joy asked.

“Dead.”

Daphne had two other men she “went to dinner with”: one she had picked up at a coffee shop farther downtown near her apartment, the other the widower of an old friend. But it had been a hard winter for them, and for Daphne, too: “All my boyfriends are dead.”

Joy felt dizzy. Maybe matzo-ball soup and waffles was a bad idea. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“My kids think I should consider going into assisted living.”

“
Do
they. Well, what do
you
think?”

“They worry because they’re not here. They want me to come to them in Cincinnati. Well, to a place near them in Cincinnati. I understand. But I can’t go to Cincinnati. I told them I’m staying, and it’s called ‘Aging in Place.’ That’s what the social workers call it.”

“You saw a social worker?”

“No, of course not. In Florida they talk about these things. It’s all the rage in the world of gerontology, otherwise known as Florida. Aging in Place.”

“Like running in place.”

“Going nowhere fast.” Daphne laughed.

“Whatever they call it, it’s better than a nursing home…”

“… In Cincinnati!”

“I read somewhere that Cincinnati is a very nice city. Or was it Charlotte?”

“The assisted-living place on Eighty-sixth Street is supposed to be beautiful,” Daphne said. “Leonard’s children sent him there, you know.”

“Leonard?” Leonard, their handsome classmate in college, Leonard who had proposed to her all those many years ago. A lot of men had proposed to her. Men did that in those days, proposed. Why? What was their hurry? Oh yes, the Korean War, that was it. She had expected Karl to propose, but he was more sensible than the rest of them, he was waiting until he had a decent job, that’s what he said when she told him she was going to marry Aaron. “I saw Leonard about a year ago. He drove past in a red Cadillac convertible with a woman half his age. If that.”

“He picked her up in a bar. They went to Bermuda together, and he had a heart attack and wound up in the hospital. His daughter had to fly down, and that, as they say, was the end of that.”

“He took her to Bermuda?”

Daphne nodded.

“Who goes to Bermuda?”

*   *   *

Joy got a bad cold after that outing. She stayed in the apartment for a week, ten days, twelve, ordering chicken soup from the coffee shop. The cold turned into bronchitis.

“Whatever you do,
don’t
get pneumonia,” Molly said.

Joy promised that she would not.

She wondered what her children would do if she did get pneumonia. Put her in a home? Just until you get better, for your own good. What if they decided to leave her there, for her own good? The thought kept her up that night and woke her up many nights after. They had never said anything about sending her off to an assisted-living place. They couldn’t send her against her will. They wouldn’t send her anywhere against her will! And she didn’t even have pneumonia! She told herself these things. But you never know. That was one thing she had learned over the years. You really never know anything.

30

Ruby went to Hebrew school three times a week after school. She babysat for Rabbi Kenny every Thursday night when he and his wife went out to dinner and to the movies. He had five-year-old twin boys.

“The only problem,” Daniel told Molly, “is that she wants to change her name to Rachel.”

Daniel talked about his daughters incessantly. There had been a time when his fascination with his own offspring had annoyed Molly, but since she’d moved to Los Angeles, Ruby and Cora had become like fantastical figures in a storybook, characters in a book about a magical, faraway place: Home. Now she encouraged Daniel. When he talked about his children, she felt she could safely relax and indulge herself in nostalgia and love for the city she left behind.

“She gave the rabbi’s kids all her old Pokémon cards.”

“Very generous.”

“Well, I guess she kind of outgrew them. And Cora didn’t want them. Not that she actually asked Cora.”

“I miss everyone so much,” Molly said.

“Did you talk to Mom today?”

“I did. She said she was very tired and the doctor told her to use her asthma inhaler thing, and she fell asleep reading the paper and woke up and thought it was morning. She was feeling a little better, so she ordered a turkey burger for dinner and she ate half of it.”

They hung up happy in the knowledge that their mother was thriving.

31

Joy began to feel that there was another person in the apartment, a stranger, and it was her. She had to watch over this person, this boring, fearful, sickly person. She had to make sure it took its pills. She had to watch its step so it didn’t fall. She made sure it chewed its food so it didn’t choke. She worried about the person constantly; the worry was a weight heavy on her shoulders, on her mind, on her heart. It followed her as she followed this person from room to room, this awful, needy person who was herself.

“I don’t know what to do with her.
And
she’s an
irritating
person. What a responsibility!” she said to Molly.

She had begun timing herself in the morning to see how long it took her to get dressed.

“It feels like two hours, and it is.”

Sometimes she didn’t bother to get dressed.

“It saves so much time. Some days I don’t even want to take a shower, but then I think, Well! I’ll do it for my children. I don’t want them to have a filthy old mother with fuzzy gray hair.”

“You’re funny,” Molly always said, laughing, relieved—Joy could hear it in her voice. That was another of the responsibilities Joy had, relieving her children of worry. She did not want them to be upset. And she did not want them to send her to an assisted-living facility in Cincinnati. Or anywhere else.

32

Joy looked out her window and felt an affinity for the ugly March street and the ugly March sky. Even her heart felt ugly, especially her heart, dusty and empty except for the shaky memories scattered around like sticks of broken furniture. She was physically ugly, too, listless skin sagging at her jaw, red-rimmed eyes—she examined her face in the mirror and took a certain satisfaction in its fall from beauty. It was the only power she seemed to have anymore—the power to deteriorate. Her hair was too long, too thin, scraggly and white like a witch’s hair, and there was a long white hair on her chin. Her clothes, which had once charmed and fascinated her, now sulked in the closet, a closet that had no light. She tried a flashlight. It was too heavy for her, twisting her wrist so painfully she grabbed at the doorframe to keep her balance. Everything was too heavy for her these days, even the clothes themselves. Those she extracted were random and old, decades old. Excellent quality, she could still appreciate that. Pity they didn’t fit, pity about the moth holes, pity about so many things. She lost weight, something that automatically pleased her, until she remembered that she’d lost the weight because of illness, stress, old age. Her good Italian knit pants fell right down to her feet, like a clown’s pants in the circus, like Aaron’s pants, a thought that made her sit on the edge of the bed, that made the room spin. Usually she ended up wearing the same gray sweatshirt, the one Aaron had worn, and a pair of black jersey pants she’d gotten at the Gap, although the drawstring was tied in an inextricable knot.

She sat at the table not even bothering to look at the car lights outside. Lou Barney, Lou Barney, who the hell was Lou Barney? The iPad only wanted to play Lou Barney, flashing his name on the screen. Joy had never heard of him. Why did Molly and Danny ever get her this thing? It was very generous of them, but it always wanted to play Lou Barney, and then wouldn’t even play him, whoever he was. Joy shook the iPad. She was just about to call Molly when she decided to try one more time. She changed glasses and tapped the screen.

It wasn’t Lou Barney. It was Low Battery.

I really cannot take much more of the modern world, she thought. I really cannot.

Soon after Lou Barney, Molly came for a week, by herself. Joy was still coughing, but the bronchitis was mostly gone. She had not gotten pneumonia.

“That’s wonderful, Mom. You look so much better than I expected. You’re so independent.”

Joy said, Yes, I am. She did not say, Thank god you’re here, Molly, I could not have taken one more minute on my own, I’m so weak I can hardly lift my toothbrush.

She took a walk with Molly and tried not to lean on her arm.

“Mom? Are you okay? You look a little pale.”

“It’s the weather,” Joy said.

Molly took her arm gently. “I’m glad you’ve taken such good care of yourself.”

“Danny did what he could,” Joy said. “And now you’re here.”

She felt Molly stiffen, for just a split second. Then Molly stopped and wrapped her arms around her. Joy’s face was pressed uncomfortably against the zipper of her daughter’s coat.

“I don’t want to be a burden,” Joy said.

Molly laughed. “I should hope not.”

It was about a month later that Joy was finally able to force herself to go back to work. She took a cane. Her bags seemed heavier than ever, but the weather was better, no snow, no rain, just a vicious wind. Gregor got her a cab. She immediately began to worry about whether she’d be able to get a cab home. It would be too windy to wait for the bus even with the cane. The cane had four little feet and a dirty white stripe where someone had torn off the adhesive tape on which the name Aaron Bergman had been scrawled in black Sharpie. I should have gotten him a nicer cane, she thought. How could I have let him walk around with this?