by Alix Ohlin
“Don’t call it a thing,” I said. I was in tears.
Robin held up her hand. “Lark,” she said, “this just started, and you’re already driving me crazy.”
My inclination was to tell no one of our plan, to cradle it inside, in the same tender place it had lived before. I wanted to protect myself from the possibility of more failure. But my sister wasn’t like me; she turned my fears inside out, and wouldn’t hide anything. She told Bernard, she told Derya; she told our mother, who listened to the story with an impatience she didn’t bother to conceal.
“I don’t know why you’re telling me this,” she said at last. “You’ve always done whatever you wanted anyway.”
“We’re not asking you for permission,” Robin said. “We just want you to know you’re going to have a grandchild.”
I winced as she said it, at the certainty in her voice. Our mother’s eyes narrowed, and her hands shook as she raised her teacup to her lips.
“Neither of you knows what it is to be a mother.” Her bitterness was permanent, like a bone that had broken in her and healed crookedly; it couldn’t be straightened now. “Marianne,” I said, and reached out my hand to her. She didn’t take it.
“Don’t bother, Lark,” my sister said. “You’ll never change her mind.”
It was true that I couldn’t change it, but her mind was changing all the time anyway, its territory ever shifting, like a beach as the water came and went. She was pleasant one day, hateful the next. She was always nicest when she forgot who we were.
31.
For a few days after Marianne was found, I stayed with her, Bernard and Robin having gone back to the Laurentians, and I could tell I was getting on her nerves. She didn’t like to see me in the morning, asleep on the couch, when she was preparing her tea. She still began each day with the newspaper, although I noticed that sometimes she picked up the previous day’s edition, if it hadn’t been cleared away, and read it without noting the repetition. Other times she sat in silence, looking out the window as her tea cooled, thinking I don’t know what thoughts.
One day as I came out of the shower I found her searching through my suitcase, which I kept in a corner of the living room, my things jumbled inside. She glanced up at me, not seeming to feel any guilt. “Aha,” she said, holding up my digital video camera like a piece of incriminating evidence. “What are you doing with this?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I threw my towel on the couch, which I knew annoyed her, and dressed quickly. “I usually carry it with me. In case.”
“In case of what?” she said, like a lawyer badgering a witness.
“In case I want to use it,” I said. At Robin’s, I’d occasionally done some filming. I shot the trees whipping during a storm, the outside of the barn, random moments that seemed, when I looked at them again back in New York, to have captured none of the spirit of the place, and which I then erased. My mother was turning the camera over in her hands, gingerly, as if it might explode.
“Remember when you filmed me before?”
I’d never shown her the footage. I felt a pang now, though I wasn’t sure why; because I’d thought she wouldn’t like what I’d filmed, or because I’d stopped editing the footage, finding it too depressing.
“Let’s do it again,” she said.
For the next few days, we filmed. It was the first thing she wanted to do in the morning and the last thing before she went to bed. She arranged herself on her sofa, put on her lipstick, and presented herself to the camera. She didn’t want me to ask questions. She had many things to say, and opinions spilled from her as if she’d long been denied them. She thought women these days were becoming too much like men. She thought we should all be concerned about the coming plague as global travel brought germs to North America on planes. I didn’t remind her that I had worked extensively on plagues. “It’s retribution,” she told the camera—unlike most subjects, she was very good at talking to the camera and not to me—“for the hell we inflicted on the First Nations. Smallpox and all the rest.”
From smallpox she meandered into a discussion of her own health, and then told a story about a girl she’d known as a child, who had died of meningitis, and from there to a lengthy condemnation of a pharmacist in the neighborhood who had left her husband for another man. “She thinks she deserves something better,” she said, “but she doesn’t.”
When I could get a word in, I asked her about herself, about the years of Robin’s and my childhood, even, with some hesitation, about Hervé, but the answers I received bore no relation to the questions. She seemed to be responding to some inner inquisitor whose voice was more commanding than mine. Sometimes she stopped mid-sentence and shifted to a different topic, as if she’d been interrupted and redirected. Sometimes, after speaking at great length, she would glance at me, surprised and almost abashed, as if she’d forgotten I was there. But if she’d forgotten, then to whom had she been speaking?
This time I was more judicious setting up the shots. The filming happened to coincide with a string of sunny days, so her apartment was brightly lit and cheerful, and she dressed with care, each day wearing a different blouse and necklace, matching earrings. She turned to the camera as if it were the audience she’d been waiting for all her life.
* * *
—
I got a testy email from Javier, who was my producer on a new show, a docu-soap about a mother-daughter team who had once been rich but now were cash-poor and attempting to mount a comeback by starting a gourmet dog-food business. They cooked the food themselves in the kitchen of a model home in Phoenix and based it on their own diet, which was Paleo-organic. Their house was full of dogs, who jumped on the furniture and slept in the beds; at Costco and Whole Foods they sat upright in carts, gazing down the aisles. The barking made editing a nightmare. But the women were surprisingly funny and I missed the hours I spent capturing their barbed banter, how the daughter would smack her mother’s jutting hipbones to move her out of the way, or drop foie gras into a blender and say, “Well, here goes nothing. Four hundred dollars of nothing.” I’d pled a family emergency when leaving, but we were on deadline and the network was impatient. Unless you’re missing a limb, Javier wrote, it’s time to come back. And even then it might depend which one.
Marianne had tired of the filming and she had a slight cold that made her even more querulous than usual. She lay in bed all day, and when I offered to bring her soup or tea she scowled and told me to leave her alone. I don’t know why I lingered where I wasn’t welcome. Robin didn’t want me to visit either. She didn’t want me hovering over her, obsessing over her body “like it’s your rental property,” she said. I’d spent a night at the cottage and even that was too much for her. She went to bed early, after which I found Bernard and interrupted his reading, not wanting to be alone.
He put down his book and asked me, “What are you going to call it?”
“It depends,” I said carefully. Of course I dreamed about the future, my arms cradling a body that couldn’t yet be held. But I couldn’t speak about it, or about how often the dreams turned to nightmares in which the baby came to harm, and it was always my fault—there were car accidents and earthquakes and sudden gaping chasms in the ground and each time the baby slipped from my arms and fell away into a nothingness that was the only thing left when I woke up.
“Do you think it’s a boy or a girl?” he said.
We’d told the doctor we didn’t want to know. “I have no idea,” I said.
“I think it’s a girl,” he said.
“Let’s stop talking about it. It makes me nervous.”
“Okay,” he said. “But can I ask you one thing?”
I buttoned my lips, nodded.
“Can I come visit her?” he said.
“Of course,” I said, and he smiled.
“I had a little
sister,” he said. “They took her away. I was good with her. But I was too young to take care of her, and my mom, well, you know how she was.”
I looked at him closely, but his face was as untroubled as ever, as strangely serene. “I didn’t know you had a sister. What happened to her?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said. “She went into foster care and then got adopted. My mom never found out where she was put. We always thought maybe she’d come looking for us, but she didn’t. I guess she doesn’t even remember us.”
I tried to fathom the sadness of this, but couldn’t: it was a dark well, so deep I couldn’t make out its bottom. But it explained something to me about Bernard: his softness, and his friendliness to and need for women, and how some part of him seemed stuck in childhood, mired there. As if he was still waiting for her.
“Robin never told me about that,” I said.
“She doesn’t know.”
I was puzzled. Why had he told me and not my sister, to whom he’d been so much closer, and for so long? Later, I decided that he’d withheld it from her out of some instinct for secrecy, understanding that she craved distance from him as much as she brought him close. In this, as in other things, he knew her well, which was one of the reasons they’d each stayed part of the other’s life.
“I hope she remembers you,” I told him.
He shrugged. “I don’t,” he said. “It might make her sad.”
I asked if he’d looked for her, what her name was, what she’d looked like, but he was done with the conversation; standing up, he told me with gentle finality that it was time for bed.
32.
Robin and I planned to move Marianne into an assisted-living facility. A spot would open the following month, with a kitchenette and a private bath. She could make her tea; she had a view of a field where deer, we’d been told, could sometimes be seen. Did she enjoy nature? The director had asked when we took the tour. We shook our heads; she didn’t. The director looked stricken. “Our residents find this view quite soothing,” she said anyway.
What did our mother enjoy? It was a question we’d spent our lives not answering. She liked complaining about the world, about us. Finally Robin said, “She likes to read the news,” and the director was able to promise a daily newspaper delivery, so we all moved on.
Then we met with the doctor who’d evaluated Marianne’s condition and would supervise her care. Robin said, “Isn’t it too early for her to be like this? She’s not even sixty.”
The doctor, a genial, bearded man, smiled patronizingly and said, “It’s never too early for most things.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Robin said.
The doctor’s voice was bland. “It means things happen when they happen,” he said.
In preparation for the move, I helped Marianne organize her belongings. There wasn’t much to do; she’d already discarded so many. I wanted to be useful, to ease her transition from one place to the next, but instead we fought constantly. Every time I touched anything she yelped as if I were going to ruin it. I gave up, shouted at her that she was being unreasonable, and left the apartment. When I came back, she was contrite, and she sidled up to me like a child. “I’m sorry,” she said stiffly.
I put my arms around her. Awkwardly I kissed her head. What came over me, that I kissed my mother’s head? We had no fluency in affection; it was a language we’d never learned to speak.
* * *
—
That was the last time I saw her.
I flew back to New York and went to work. When I returned to Montreal several weeks later, for the scheduled move, I rang the doorbell at Marianne’s building and received no answer. This in itself wasn’t unusual, even when she was home and expecting me. Her hearing was fine, but when caught up in a task—reading the newspaper, folding laundry, even looking out the window—she seemed to shut the world out so completely that nothing could penetrate her attention. I’d finally taken her keys and copied them so that I could get in whenever I wanted to. This was a Wednesday evening, around nine, and I hadn’t eaten. I stood on the stoop of her building, watching the restaurant across the street, which was, as always, empty. How they survived, I had no idea. Marianne believed they were running an illegal business for which the restaurant was a front—drugs, she said, or laundering money for one of the biker gangs—and I’d told her she was being dramatic, but in fact she was often right about things like this. Even when her brain was confused, her pronouncements were sharp. It made her dementia harder to grasp, because it alternated with such lucidity.
After waiting a decent interval, I let myself into the building and climbed upstairs. The morning newspaper lay folded on the mat outside her apartment door: this was the first sign that something was wrong. When I opened the door, I could feel the silence. My mother was often quiet, but this quiet was different.
She had died in her sleep. She was lying on her back, her hands at her sides, her face without expression.
I called Robin, and Bernard drove her down. I waited for them in the living room, as if I didn’t want to intrude on my mother’s privacy even after her death. Spooked and frozen, I sat on the couch for two hours with my hands on my knees; I didn’t know what else to do.
The three of us gathered in her apartment as we had the day of her disappearance. Later, the doctor said he thought it was an embolism. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think she’d taken pills or anything but somehow, I felt, she’d done it on purpose. With the same defiance that had fueled her whole life, the same anger and independence, she had lain down and willed herself not to wake up.
33.
Nothing surprised me more than the way Robin fell apart when our mother died. One minute she was full of energy, a bombastic and self-determined person who seemed to do and think whatever she wanted, and the next she was couch-prone and immobile. She stopped. I was so shocked by it that my own emotions skittered into a dark corner, hiding, and I didn’t retrieve them for a long time. I’d grown used to the energetic, capable Robin, and suddenly she was replaced by a Robin who wept all day and refused to leave her bed.
I took charge of the necessary tasks. We buried Marianne in a small ugly cemetery in Laval, where years ago she’d bought a plot for reasons that were unknown to us. So much of her remained a mystery. She’d left instructions about the service, indicating that under no circumstances were we to contact the family from whom she’d been estranged since her adolescence. Do not burn me, she also wrote, so we didn’t. We wore dresses and high heels and the wind sliced our stockinged legs. Her old boyfriend the dentist came, and a couple of her friends from the neighborhood, and they pressed our hands and then scurried quickly back to their cars, eager to get out of the cold. I thought we should play music, or sing, or say something. I remembered how, at Worthen, Robin had taken charge of the funeral for Emma’s cat, how she’d sung a Beatles song. I didn’t suggest she sing now; she could barely stand up. She leaned against me, her pregnant belly curtained by her unbuttoned coat, swiping at her runny nose with the palm of her hand. I kept giving her tissues and she kept losing them. We couldn’t decide on an inscription for the tombstone so we only put Marianne’s name and the dates of her life, the barest bracket of a person, and then we went back to her apartment and Bernard and I drank whiskey and Robin lay down on the couch, crying. I sat down next to her, patted her shoulder, but I could feel her tense; my touch was no comfort. She kept her eyes closed. I looked helplessly at Bernard, and he got up and turned on the radio; a piano sonata came into the room, low and delicate, but it seemed to enrage Robin, who sat up long enough to say, “Turn that fucking thing off,” before lying back down and resuming her tears.
* * *
—
I sent her back north with Bernard and emptied the apartment by myself, donating Marianne’s possessions to the church down the street, which was hosting
a rummage sale. There wasn’t much to give. She’d occupied the apartment like a hotel room. In her dresser I came across a loose color photo of a beautiful young girl with her long hair in a braid, and I stared at it for a long time, wondering who she was. When I turned it over I realized it was the stock photo that came with a store-bought frame, which I found in a different drawer, empty. At last I cleaned the apartment and gave the key to the landlord, who took it indifferently, as if Marianne hadn’t lived there for years, as if she hadn’t just died, and then I sat in a bar down the street with a double shot of vodka, dry-eyed and queasy with colorless grief. An older man winked at me and sent over a drink. I refused it and he called me a whore and a dyke and so I left the bar, relieved that my moment of mourning had turned ugly; otherwise, I might have sat there all day.
* * *
—
When I got home to Brooklyn, I told Elena that our mother had died, and she brimmed with condolences, bringing over a casserole and a bottle of wine. She talked about her own mother, how good she was, how strict yet warm, how the moment when a daughter loses a mother is when her heart splits open forever. I sat and listened, feeling numb and a bit provoked; I didn’t think any of what she said applied to me and Marianne.
“You need to cry, little lamb,” she told me, folding a hand around mine.
“It’s complicated,” I said. “My mother—”
She squeezed my hand so hard that tears did come to my eyes. “She was still your mother,” she said firmly.
I almost preferred the guy in the bar, calling me names.
Work soothed me as it always had. The mother and daughter were having a semi-scripted falling-out over their differing visions of the dog-food company’s future, and I was heightening the drama in their tense meetings with potential distributors and store reps. In the B storyline the daughter was dating a waiter at a Mexican restaurant and the mother thought he was only into her for their money. The daughter said she was paranoid and racist. Everyone drank a lot of margaritas and said stupid things. The daughter wore revealing tops that were forever threatening to slip an inch too low, even for cable television. Her mother told her she dressed like a desperate prostitute and the daughter said she’d learned from the best.