Washing the Dead (17 page)

“Nope.” He got up to leave. “You snuck out without getting caught.”

I felt as though he was comparing my outing to my mother’s late-night adventures with the Shabbos goy. But he wasn’t. He knew nothing about the Shabbos goy or the hazy force drawing and repelling me from my mother right now.

9

B
ig Al died in his sleep. The morning of Lili’s release from the hospital, Neil called to tell me that he and Jenny were taking the next flight to St. Paul. While Sam checked Lili out of the hospital, I picked up my mother. The rebbetzin’s words had been prescient. My mother’s care had in fact fallen on me, albeit temporarily.

Neil’s kitchen smelled like coffee and hair dye. My mother was leaning over the sink in a stained smock while Jenny sprayed her scalp with one hand and rubbed dye out of her hair with the other.

“Hey, you.” I slung my arm around Jenny’s shoulder and pulled her toward me. “I’m so sorry about your dad.”

“Is that Barbara?” my mother called over the running water, her head facing the drain.

“Hi, Mom,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready to leave?” I asked Jenny.

“Soon,” she said, massaging my mother’s scalp with shampoo. The steady movements of Jenny’s hands mesmerized me. When she finished, she blotted moisture from my mother’s hair with a towel. “Ta-dah!”

My mother looked like Lucille Ball with a bad haircut. “I’m speechless,” I muttered.

“Go take a peek.” Jenny directed my mom to the hallway mirror and turned to me with a look that said, “I tried.”

I bit my tongue. My mother was going to be upset when she
saw her hair. When Revlon modified Dark Auburn 31, she had tried four different rinses before finding the right color. So now, in the midst of taking care of Lili, I would either have to run out to Walgreens, find another dye, and redo her hair, or take her to the salon. My mother returned to the kitchen with a grin. “It’s perfect.”

Now I knew we were in trouble. “I think we’re ready, then,” she said brightly.

“Mom, you might want to give Jenny back her smock,” Neil said as he entered the kitchen with my mother’s suitcase.

She looked down at the blue floral polyester and laughed. “Silly me.”

I gave Jenny a bear hug as Neil led our mother out to my car and settled her in.

“We’ll be back in two days,” he said.

“You take care of your wife.” I kissed his cheek.

I’d get through this. I’d mentally hunker down as I had for the Caribbean cruise we took to celebrate Rose and Artie’s fiftieth wedding anniversary, though I knew beforehand that a vat of Bonine wouldn’t stave off my motion sickness. Maybe I wasn’t ready yet to assume my mother’s care, but I’d worry about that later. For now, I just had to survive two days. One hour at a time.

Sam headed out to the office right after we arrived. I wish he’d given me a few minutes to check in on Theresa, which I’d been wanting to do all day. I knew she could handle the class, but I wanted to call her and hear her talk to me as if I were the guru she thought I was, and I wanted my mother to go back to Neil’s house so I could go back to Theresa and my kids.

Lili looked up from the television when my mother and I walked into the den. “Hi, Grandma,” she said, groggy from pain medication, a blanket I’d crocheted draped over her shoulders. It was unusual to see Lili so still. She was always moving—jiggling her leg, stretching, pacing—even when she was sitting down.

“Oh, look at your foot, all bandaged up. Does it hurt something awful?” my mother clucked.

“Uh-huh.” Lili’s glassy eyes lingered on my mother’s hair.

I sat on the ottoman and fussed with the pillows under her ankle. “Let’s get you elevated.”

“What are you watching?” my mother asked.

“
Titanic
,” Lili mumbled.

I heard a humming noise, probably the whiny motor from our neighbor’s leaf blower, but it was coming from the direction of my mother’s chair. I looked over at her, and she was indeed humming, bobbing her head, eyes closed, as if she were trying her hardest to recall something.

“Mom, you okay?” I asked.

She opened her mouth, and a song I’d learned at summer camp tumbled out of her. “It was sad when the great ship went down to the bottom of the sea … fishes and turtles, little ladies lost their girdles….”

Lili stared at my mother, her eyes large as dessert plates. We let her finish singing.

My mother was the only person in our family who could carry a tune, and I remembered how she sang to me when I was a little girl. Her illness had stripped her of her inhibitions, made her much looser. Maybe these few days weren’t going to be so rotten after all. Maybe there was an opening for all of us and she’d finally let us in. Maybe I’d let her in, too. “Now, that takes me back to a very long and bumpy bus ride,” I said.

“You hated that camp,” my mother said.

“What camp?” Lili tore her eyes away from Leonardo DiCaprio.

“It was a Jewish camp out in the cornfields, too Jappy for your mama.”

My mother never used words like that. I laughed nervously. “I’m going to show Grandma to your room,” I said to Lili, assuming that Sam had discussed the sleeping arrangements with her. Lili was going to sleep on the pullout couch in Sam’s office to avoid the steps.

Lili shot me a look.

“Lili would rather I not,” my mother said, a perfectly lucid
observation she normally would have refrained from voicing.

“Well,” I said, “Lili doesn’t have a vote on this. She can’t handle the steps yet.” Besides I wanted my mother upstairs in case she wandered.

I settled my mother in Lili’s room, and she told me to go tend to my daughter. She was tired and wanted to read her new biography of FDR. I was relieved that she could still enjoy this pleasure. She pulled her book out of her suitcase and opened it up to the first page. I went back downstairs.

“Mommy, it really hurts.” Lili pointed to her ankle. She had an enormous pain threshold, which was what made her such a promising endurance runner.

I sat down next to her, and she rested her head on my shoulder.

“Forty more minutes, and I can give you another Vicodin,” I said.

“Good.”

I could feel her eyelashes brush against my skin.

“Grandma’s kind of funny this way, not so ice princessy.”

“We should probably cut your grandmother a little slack right now. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Lil.”

“I figured,” she said, picking up her head from my shoulder.

“So what do you think?” I tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear.

“That’s sad.”

“It’s okay for you to be sad.”

“I said it’s sad that she’s sick, but I’m not sad, because I don’t really know her. Is that okay?”

No, it’s not okay, and I don’t know her either, I wanted to say. “It’s okay, but we can wish it were different.”

Titanic
was over. Lili started punching buttons on the remote, and I got up and made grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch. I called up to my mother, and the three of us ate them on trays in front of the television. Lili had found a documentary about the Spanish-American War on the History Channel, a network she’d begun watching after Sam and I designated it the only television
we’d allow. Now she trounced both of us in the history category of Trivial Pursuit.

My mother watched intently, and when a commercial came on, she said, “They’ll talk about the Treaty of Paris next, you watch.”

Lili and I looked at each other.

My mother clapped her hands together three times. “It’s how we came to acquire the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico, ladies.”

Lili grinned for the first time since she’d been home. “That’s the treaty that ended the Spanish-American War, Mom.”

They started to chat easily about William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan and their opposing views on acquiring the Philippines, and I remembered the last time I’d seen them enjoy each other. My mother had visited a few months before Lili was diagnosed with ADHD along with a slight amorphous learning disability that made reading and writing difficult for her. Sam, Neil, and the boys were watching a Packers game in the den, and Jenny and I were slicing bagels in the kitchen. When the food was ready, I found Lili and my mother huddled together on the sofa with a soft tan leather scrapbook, a gift from my mother, straddling their laps. They were inspecting the empty pages as if they were silently mapping out the placement of Lili’s mementos and photos. A mix of jealousy and longing ripped through me as I remembered what it felt like to languish in the warmth of my mother’s undivided attention. Lili startled her by kissing her cheek, and I turned around quickly, pretending that I didn’t see the surprise on my mother’s face. After the brunch, I found Lili in her room, sifting through a pile of ticket stubs, photos, newspaper clippings, and party favors she’d been collecting, as if she’d been waiting for this very scrapbook to appear.

Lili’s tutor had encouraged her to continue creating collages, because they gave her a nonlinear outlet to order her thoughts and perceptions. “Lili’s collages reflect her great gift, a ‘subliminal awareness’ of the people she cares about,” the tutor wrote in her final evaluation letter. I didn’t completely understand the term
“subliminal awareness,” but I was so proud of Lili’s “great gift,” particularly after watching her struggle with her schoolwork, that I’d neglected to give props to my mother, who had intuited Lili’s need and filled it. My mother’s scrapbook was the first of dozens Lili completed throughout the years. The memory made me feel like a canoe capsizing in rapids of love and regret.

I stared at the two of them, completely absorbed in the documentary. “You ladies sure know your history,” I said. I waited for another commercial to tell Lili that her grandmother practically ran the history department up at the university.

My mother gazed at the television with a nostalgic smile. “I learned about all this when I typed up a paper on the Treaty of Paris for Norman in college.”

She had to be talking about her brother, because when Neil was in college, she’d been too preoccupied with the Shabbos goy to pay attention to him.

“Who’s Norman?” Lili asked.

“Your grandmother’s brother,” I said.

Lili looked baffled. “Norman? Where is he? Did he die?”

“Shhh, let’s watch this part. I’m a big McKinley fan.” My mother looked at Lili and pointed to the remote. “Will you turn it up, dear? I can’t figure out these buttons.”

Lili turned up the volume and mouthed to me, “Norman?”

I shrugged.

“You sure have a lot of secrets, Grandma,” Lili said through a yawn, but her words chilled me. I couldn’t tell if my mother was engrossed in the show or just hadn’t heard Lili’s comment, but either way, she remained the vault, and none of us, maybe including her, had the key to open the door.

I squeezed Lili’s shoulder, got up and cleared the plates, and pulled the glossy Lakeline brochure from my purse. The photos featured old people visiting with younger versions of themselves, sipping iced tea on a lovely veranda at tables covered by blue and red umbrellas. A young girl I recognized as my former student Nancy Feinberg played checkers with one of the residents. Up
until a few minutes ago, I couldn’t imagine Lili casually playing checkers with my mother. I’d been so careful to make sure that my mother could never hurt Lili that I’d thwarted what might have blossomed between them.

Shortly after four, Theresa and Sarah knocked on the back door, carrying an aluminum pan covered in foil and a bouquet of Mylar balloons.

“I can’t believe you two,” I said as I let them into the house.

Theresa put the lasagna down on the kitchen table, and we went into the den. Sarah handed Lili the balloons.

Lili grinned again. “Oh my God, these have designs on them.” She pulled each one toward her and examined it with glee.

Sarah sat down next to her. “You’ve probably outgrown Hello Kitty by now, but we couldn’t help ourselves.”

Theresa walked over to my mother, who was looking on with great interest. “Hello, Mrs. Pupnick, my name is Theresa. I’m your daughter’s assistant teacher.”

“Mom, this is Sarah, my boss and our fearless leader, and Theresa, my partner in crime.”

Sarah piped in. “Your daughter is actually my boss. She runs the place.”

“Well, she certainly is lucky to work with such generous people,” my mom said.

“It’s our pleasure. Barbara is always the first person to organize meals when people need it,” Theresa said.

“Yeah, Mom, I’m a Brisket Lady,” I blurted out before I could stop myself.

Everyone looked confused except my mother. She laughed, and I warmed at the notion of our sharing an inside joke.

“So, ladies, please tell me what happened today at school,” I said.

They looked at each other. “You’ve got your hands full, we can talk about it later,” Theresa said.

I knew what they were avoiding. “Ally Cooper?”

They nodded.

“I’ll call her mom tonight.” Ally had been teasing and hitting another little girl. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with Lili and my mother, I would have called Ally’s mother this week as a preemptive strike. I’d observed Ally in the threes, and she was a different kid this year. Something was going on, and I would figure it out. Some people took apart cars or ham radios for a hobby. I liked figuring out the puzzle of a child like Ally.