Sitting on the bedside chair, his eyes tear. She says nothing when he asks how she’s feeling. She returns to her closet view. There is no response when he asks if she knows him. She holds up her hand, studies it as if searching for an answer to
all this. Her tiny wedding band slips to the base of her finger. There are light bruises on the insides of her forearms. Lilacs come to mind. His father talked of spring lilacs,
aromas drifting into schoolrooms to put kids to sleep. Her favorite flower was the Easter lily. She doesn’t know she’s a widow. Her hair is a mess and he recalls the smell of home permanents. As her frustrated head drops to the sheet, Jeff wonders whether she’ll take the pills. He walks to the window. His car is in the lot on the other side. He nudges the bed, wonders if he could have rolled and positioned her to see his new car if he’d picked the correct parking.
Once he took a night school Philosophy course. When the professor covered Existentialism, he asked if man is anything more than “a bag of guts with eyes.” Many argued, stressing the soul. Jeff silently agreed with them but wouldn’t be in that camp now. The disease erases the mind backwards he read but how quickly. Has she moved past me? Is she the high school girl at graduation in a photo he has, holding diploma with both hands, arms limp? Her scarf looped around the collar of a roomy white blouse reminds him of his Navy neckerchief. The pleated skirt ends below her knees. She is not smiling. Two frizzes of hair hide her ears. Is his mother’s dementia just an act? Is she just tired of life? Was this last ditch nursing home slum the only solution? Yeah, she found an escape. One up on the bowtie man who fails to bolt to another place, homeless on the streets is an improvement. Jeff leans close to her, “Give me a cameo in your reruns, just another kid on the block. Now wave, blink your eyes twice if that’s all you can handle.
He promises God he’ll worship him if she’s brought back for just a few minutes.” He’s the child in that novel who placed his drum before a statue of the baby Jesus, demanded that he play. She doesn’t blink. Jesus pounded out no fanfare. She at least stares at Jeff. Her eyes are filmy, tired. She looks pregnant, probably overfed like the Bird Lady.
Jeff takes her hand and hopes there is some link between them that outwits this creepy disease. He tries to force his love across the link. He thinks he knows what love is now that his father is gone and she might as well be. He never got around to saying it, but he always included the word over his name in letters and cards. Maybe he said it times he came home sloppy drunk.
He tells her he missed the big deathbed scene with dad. Jeff’s positive he would have worked in “love.” Even though he didn’t know what it was, he would have said it, gone along with what he’d seen in such situations on TV and in the movies. So Goddamn precise, always measuring words and feelings with a micrometer to be sure they matched. Jeff was temperate about all the wrong things. He tells his mother he loves her. He figures she doesn’t know what in hell he’s saying and judges himself punished. Never mind the word; he acted it sometimes, didn’t he? He can’t stand the leaden silence. The quiet is like the Route 80 hitchhiker’s but he said something at the end of the ride. Have you stored some words to escort your last breath? He wishes he had taped her voice, his father’s too. Then maybe death and the disease wouldn’t be so bad. Please, some movement, anything. Let my apologies go to you, send back forgiveness.” She breaks wind. No embarrassment there’s just a baby’s expression of bewilderment.
A woman wearing a mantilla walks in. A small silver cross is pinned to her sweater. She wants to know if Jeff’s mother wants communion. Jeff tells her she wouldn’t know communion from a Ritz Cracker. In the back of his mind, a sixth grade nun lectures on miraculous recovery after receiving the host. He almost calls the do-gooder back. Then he realizes he has the miracle, the sacrament is in his pocket. Will she be able to swallow the pills? All of her food is pureed.
Jeff recalls her saying her tattered novenas, reading Father Payton’s rosary book, death’s prayer cards for bookmarks. He pictures her walking to church in pouring rain, fingering rosary beads in her pocket, upset because she forgot the budget envelope. How many times did Jeff’s drinking and gambling send her to prayer? All those losing tickets for the Columban Fathers’ car raffles sitting on a kitchen shelf: the consolation prize is a wall closet to stare at and a maudlin son.
He’s getting timid about the miracle remedy, fears she’ll choke. Maybe that would be best! God’s will—so to speak, God’s damned will. He hasn’t consulted his watch yet. Jeff feels like a runner who’s promised himself to avoid checking the time until he’s reached a certain point in a marathon. How long a visit is enough? How much is owed? She looks worried. He remembers that expression most. Please smile, please. He wants to be able to recall her smiling the rest of his days. She looks like she might be trying to say something but yawns instead. When Jeff was a kid, listening to her talk with her sisters about so and so, he’d ask for a name. She’d say “Sweeny.” Now he’s the mysterious Sweeny. He remembers his father counting in Italian, reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy.
It’s now or never! Filling her glass from a water pitcher by the bed, he removes the pills from his pocket. They’re as big as M&M peanuts, like aspirin he bought on liberty once in Cannes. (He recalls her crushing baby aspirin using two spoons.)
The instructions say “Take One Daily” but Jeff decides on three: for the Trinity. He slips one in her mouth and offers the straw. She drinks. He provides another. She starts to cough on the third. Jeff panics! What will he tell the nurse? He rolls her over and slaps her back. She is still. She’s smiling! “Bastard, bastard, bastard…” she yells, like a child finding a new word! Jeff is shocked. He remembers her cursing his father’s gambling: “Blasted horses!” but never “bastard.” The nurse comes running in, says he must leave.
Jeff wants to run but instead walks slowly out of the room. He studies the highly polished grey tile beneath his feet. The money he gave to the lady looking for a cigarette must have been sufficient. She’s smoking up a storm. She spins her wheelchair around, “Bastard” she shouts. The Bird Woman nods in her sleep. The dapper fellow leans forward in his chair like a sprinter waiting for the start of a race, squints Jeff’s way. The desk nurse gives Jeff a look reeking of wish-I-had-you-under-my-care for five-minutes-or-so.
The flies are back in the elevator. In the lobby, Jeff signs out quickly and sprints to the car. The ballgame is still in progress. The announcer is tells an anecdote about Yogi Berra meeting Hemingway. Jeff mind drifts, maybe if he crushes up the rest of the pills to sprinkle on my father’s grave he father will talk speak in a dream. Ha! Christ, it was as if she were making up for a lifetime of swearing restraint.
After driving for a few minutes, Jeff sees a guy hitchhiking. Thinking that company might be just the remedy, he stops for him. A first baseman’s mitt clutched to his chest, he’s a longhaired, gabber and the baseball game ups his tempo. He’s a baseball trivia nut, nervously pounding his hand into the glove.
“I’m going to pay you for this ride by letting you in on one of the best pieces of diamond trivia ever,” he says.
“Have you ever worked in a fertilizer factory?” Jeff asks.
“What’s that got to do with baseball?”
“Nothing, zilch, you just remind me of a guy I used to know who had a job in one.”
“Wait a minute, man; you’re not insulting me, are you?”
“Hell, no— How about getting back to that trivia question?”
“Name five pitchers that won the Cy Young Award and at one time or another played for the Mets?”
“Tom Seaver?”
“That’s the easy one.”
“Shit, I’m a Red Sox fan. What do I know about the Mets?”
“Want the answer.”
“Give me a couple of minutes.” Jeff reaches into his pocket, removes the pills. He nearly rear-ends the Corrigan Furniture truck in front of him. He pops them like candy.
“What the hell are you doing? Watch the road!
”
“Spahn, Warren Spahn,” Jeff says. “These pills will find those players. Dean Chance.”
“Let me out of here, you’re crazy. Did you escape from an insane asylum? “This car must be stolen.”
“I’ll take you to Iowa.”
“Stop, Goddamn it!” Jeff skids to the side of the road. The Trivia Guy jumps out as if the car is in flames.
“Mike Marshall and Randy Jones; come back you bastard. I have all the answers, bastard, you no good bastard.”
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