That rose must be slowly dying is the thought that occurs to me in the middle of the song. This is such a surprising and unwelcome idea that I stop singing and let the piano take over. We are all dying. The rose is just a manifestation of what’s happening every second to me you everyone. I am sweating now on the forehead.
The husband or boyfriend or whoever he is and his blond are having a conversation and laughing with their heads together and for a minute I think they’re laughing at me. At the next table the lesbian couple are singing loudly, even though I myself have stopped singing. Those two know all the words, without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own. There’s a part of me, if I’m honest, that would like to smash their homosexual heads together until they crack like eggs and all their brain goo spills out over their clothes but since, along with the rest of us, they are doomed anyway I don’t bother overmuch with this fantasy, admittedly morbid.
Daniel, why are you so morbid? I can hear my mother saying. Because I’ve always had a morbid streak. Perhaps that is why I don’t have a girlfriend. Correction: I have had very successful sexual intercourse from time to time but those girlfriends have fallen off. People tend to fall off you, Daniel, I can hear my mother say. My mother: Dead. Aunt Joan: Bonkers. Who’s falling off now, Ma?
Missy’s Mom
In her real life, her life away from Missy, Missy’s mother is not nearly so cheerful and funny. Why is that? In truth, being with Missy wears her out. Keeping Missy laughing wears her out. At home, Missy’s mom collapses onto her bed, exhausted as if after a performance. She doesn’t even take off her shoes. But here, waging war with the Deep Well of Sorrow (DWS), in the trenches with it, so to speak, and armed to the teeth, she is genuinely happy. The sweet chorus of freckles on Missy’s shoulders makes her happy and holding Missy’s bad hand—they call it the bad hand because it’s paralyzed—makes her happy. The bad hand is warm and soft, as opposed to the good hand, which is damp. In the past, before the accident, Missy’s hands were always clammy and Missy’s mom would tell her they felt nasty, even as she held them. They always held hands, those two. Before and after, the handholding persisted. Persists.
Well, what do you think? Missy’s mom asks Missy. Boyfriend material or not? Not, says Missy. I don’t like a man with a moustache. But such sprightly playing would be a plus, no? I think he’s more your type, says Missy, laughing. You could drown him out with your stupendous voice. Bitch, says Missy’s mom.
For dinner, Missy has ordered her mom a piece of salmon and herself some chicken cordon bleu. The cordon blue looks like a kitchen sponge and the salmon like a club foot garbed in a soiled athletic sock. I think possibly the chef has been overly ambitious, says the mom. Oh eat it and shut up, says Missy affably.
At home, Missy’s mom subsists on rye toast and candies. It is the DWS, she tells herself. Her shopping may also be due to the DWS. She shops as if in a dream, casting about in stores for something to take home, speeding through aisles with her cart, as if she were a participant in that TV contest where whoever stuffs her cart with the most things in twenty minutes wins a prize. Only the really repellent item is off-limits, everything else is fair game: potholders, cans of ginger snaps, tee shirts with glitter, high-heel sandals she will never ever wear. Ditto the coral lipstick and the violet eye shadow, the rum balls (hates rum), the yellow patent leather overnight bag—how cute is that?—but she never goes anywhere except to visit Missy or to meet Missy somewhere for an outing.
Mary Beth
At the next table Missy’s mom is poking at her food with her fork as if it were a dead animal. Well I guess it is a dead animal, but geez, we do try our best here and we don’t need some smarty pants looking down her nose at what we try our best to do for them and theirs. Perfectly good salmon with hollandaise, you couldn’t do any better at the Olive Garden.
Of course Pamela consumes all. Her own cordon bleu as well as her sister’s salmon. Pamela is on a restricted diet but she finds ways around it, goes off next door to the Safeway and stockpiles cookies and cupcakes in her underwear drawer. Do not think we don’t know this, Pamela. Missy is not allowed to go to the Safeway unaccompanied. When her mother comes, off they go together, but alone she is prone to wander and forget on account of her short term memory deficit. We’ve installed an alarm on her chair in case she gets it into her head to go to the Safeway unattended, but she hates the alarm and sometimes the alarm is the signal for Missy to have a meltdown. You learn all the ins and outs of these people, all the ups and downs of their idiosyncrasies and moods and toileting habits. Which I am planning to incorporate into a funny story entitled “Get Me Off this F____king Toilet,” which is an actual quote from Missy.
Just now Joan lurches in her chair and lets out one of her famous moans. I can see it has made Daniel stumble on the piano keys. He looks up and blinks his eyes a few times, then stops playing, mops his forehead with a handkerchief. I’m thinking he is probably hungry and maybe I should order him up a plate of food, he might want to eat a snack before going on since he is sweating a little, maybe feeling faint from lack of food. And all around him people eating and sawing their chicken cordon bleu and licking up the hollandaise on the salmon. Must be hell for him. I am like that. I feel for others.
But when I go up he says no, no food, but wants to know, in re to the hummingbird in my fascinator, is that a real stuffed bird? Then requests a bathroom break.
Daniel
In the stall I remove the Jack from gig bag and guzzle up. Burns going down and if I’m honest I have to admit that even at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Elementary School, I sometimes nip into the Boys for a guzzle up. It is calming to me. The children are often raucous, which gets on my nerves, but here with this brood, who are not raucous, the problem is having to look around, having to fill up eyes with the spectacle of inmates. Not big-eyed second graders with hair plastered on foreheads and chirpy voices who when you say shut up you could hear pins drop, but hunched over and moaning fatties or crazies, staring into space, or eating with hands, thumping on table out of time with music or because requiring more food, it’s hard to say which and to say shut up to these.
An additional guzzle-up of Jack, oh yes, and now in the mirror I admire my moustache and am glad again for choosing to sprout one, which was not always the case. Without a moustache I am less attractive there being a lack of upper lip, as my mother often informed me. No upper lip just like your dad, true, gave me a look that made people go off me.
I am already planning my finale of songs to include I Wish You Love and Moon River and Old Black Joe for the African Americans in the audience. But no My Funny Valentine, since I don’t know that one, sad but true.
Missy’s Mom
Missy’s mom leans over and asks if she has to pee because just yesterday there was an incident. I’m wearing a brief, Missy whispers to her mom.
Missy was wearing a brief yesterday, too, and they were at the nail salon run by the Asian women who had always been so kind to them. Always holding the door so Missy’s mom could push Missy inside, always allowing Mom to hold Missy’s bad hand open for the polish, which was hard on the mom’s back having to bend over Missy’s shoulder and forcing the bad hand open and holding it still for what felt like an eternity so the polish would not get ruined. But this day, yesterday, in the middle of the aforementioned proceedings, appeared a puddle under Missy’s wheelchair and the Asian ladies normally so kind and friendly, became suddenly distressed and horrified. And Missy’s mom ran to fetch paper towels out of the ladies’ room dispenser but the handful of thin paper towels were no match for the steaming puddle of pee that had poured from Missy onto the floor. So to no avail did Missy’s mom on hands and knees in front of other nail customers try to swab up Missy’s pee, hands getting all full of pee. Missy saying sorry sorry to everyone, and everyone, meaning the Asian ladies, saying nothing but becoming in the face more and more frozen-looking, the nail operation halted, the implements gathered up, the little bowl of warm water wit
h the glass balls in it taken to the sink, etc.
The Asian ladies now making a motion with their hands, as if wafting a stray dog out into the street from whence it came, at the same time holding the door for Missy and her mom to leave. We get mop, you go, one whispered to the mom and this one smiled showing all her teeth, like a jackal, thought the mom. Sorry, said the mom again, pushing Missy outside. Sorry, said Missy again. And Missy all wet down the front of her pink slacks and the mom put her own jacket on Missy’s lap to hide the mess.
Once in the parking lot and waiting for Handicar, Missy has already forgotten the episode, the Asian ladies, even her incomplete and ruined lavender manicure strikes her as perhaps something she chose for effect. The mom, on the other hand, feels the DWS rising up and, as soon as the Handicar has fetched Missy, she plans to appease severely rising DWS by cruising down the aisles of Ross Dress for Less.
And just then they see in the distance an old friend wearing a straw fedora, not unlike the one fruitlessly occupying a shelf in Missy’s mom’s closet. And because Missy’s long term memory has not been affected by her accident, she cries, Robert!—so overjoyed to see him that her eyes brim with tears. I like your hat! And Robert kisses each of them on their cheeks and they all chat as they wait for Handicar, Missy still with the mom’s jacket covering the wet spot on her pants.
Where are you living now, Sweetheart? An innocent enough question posed to Missy by Robert. And Missy, who can’t remember that she peed on the floor of the nail salon or the look on the Asian ladies’ faces or her own repeated heartfelt apologies or why in the world she is holding her mom’s jacket on her lap, Missy will quip, deadpan: At a resort.
THE CANCER CARD
Because he believed they were not entitled to sleep in, the houseguest blared the TV at eight in the morning. Tom plunged his head under the pillow. Next to him, Diana drooled.
She wouldn’t believe she did this routinely, but she did this routinely. Crammed into her mouth a horrible plastic thing she called an “appliance” so she wouldn’t grind her teeth and wake up with a headache he’d have to hear about all day. He held the appliance responsible for the drooling. Also, it set her mouth at a ghastly angle, like a zombie on The Walking Dead, and the zombie-like drool was disgusting, long strings of it puddling into the bed linen.
If only to appall Diane, who was nothing if not vain, he considered videoing the whole operation.
He had reached the sadly declining mid 60s, where life had begun to feel like a zero-sum game. Each sweetness speedily countered by an equivalent bitterness. Even before he hoisted himself from bed and toe-groped his slippers on the floor, before he peed and weighed himself on the high-tech digital scale he’d had installed in his bedroom (Diane said it looked like a kidney dialysis machine, though she’d never seen a dialysis machine), before he brushed his teeth and padded into the kitchen to fire up his expensive coffee machine, he could count on ten fingers the things that were at this moment annoying him.
Of these, the houseguest took first place. Cranking up the TV sound in the early a.m. was not acceptable. But the houseguest had cancer (Diane needlessly reminded him) and so they were banned from saying anything. This put a strain on everyone involved.
Playing the cancer card, Diane had said. I think that’s what it’s called.
I get it, Tom had snapped. But I don’t have to like it.
Nearing the kitchen and his beloved Magnifica, purchased at Costco for 400 dollars (as opposed to the 600 dollars William Sonoma charged), he was able to discern among the decibels a chirpy female interacting with a hearty male. Irony was involved. Audience laughter. One thought of a lurid sky, the sun ablaze in it, a thought intended for later in the day.
The houseguest had fallen asleep in a chair, his grizzled chin slumped into his clavicle, nodding out. His hair was sparse at the crown. Not even a combover could remedy that situation.
Still nodding, the houseguest thrust out his hand. Coffee? he inquired. The houseguest had expectations. Coffee. A sweet roll. Brought to him, silver platter-wise.
Since the cancer, he’d become addicted to sugar and oxycodone, not to mention the nicotine. He smoked outside in the vicinity of Maryann the tortoise, adding to Tom’s worries about the creature.
Those tortoises live for hundreds of years, proclaimed the houseguest, whose name was Mac, a little secondhand smoke won’t kill that one.
The Magnifica rumbled to life; like a wild animal growling and wheezing, as if to clear its enormous lungs, it ground up the beans noisily and spat out a perfect cup of coffee, according to Tom. Mac was not so sure. He preferred drip, he’d told Tom more than once.
Drip is more genteel, agreed Diane, who loathed the Magnifica.
Outside the usual beautiful weather prevailed. Odd how this fact could dampen one’s enthusiasm for life, Tom reflected. Every day, the same, sunny, blue, a few breezes rustling in the palms, the swimming pool awash with sparkles. Tucson, Arizona. Who wouldn’t want to visit their old childhood friend a few times a winter?
But to Tom, this perfection of climate exemplified the bitterness cancelling out the pleasure. Would he rather be in the snow and below zero temps of the northeast? No. But so much sameness was depressing, as if he were one of those bugs frozen in a teardrop of amber. All very nice unless you were the bug.
Diane arrived disheveled but, minus the appliance, a little more like a human woman. She wore flannel pajamas with a bacon-and-egg motif, her hair still in messy braids from the previous night when they’d gone to a rodeo day party at a friend’s. The rodeo provided an annual excuse for a party and the guests wore cowboy hats and jeans, even bolo ties and boots. Tom had never been to the rodeo itself. He imagined cowboys with ropes and steers dipping their horns, probably confusing it with a bullfight. There was a time when he might have been interested in such a spectacle, but he never seemed to get himself there. Now that time was past.
There are two types of people, he’d recently explained to Diane and Mac, those who try to cram everything in when they get old and those who are contented to sit back and smell the coffee. I’m that latter type.
You mean the roses, Mac had said. It’s wake up and smell the coffee, it’s stop and smell the roses.
Oh thank you so much for the info, Mac, no one said.
Now Diane pointed to the back of Mac’s head and made a face. They had both grown weary of Mac. Since his cancer diagnosis, Tom and Diane had been tasked with providing him with quality respite care: time in the sun, homemade meals, flat screen TV. Supposedly in remission, he couldn’t seem to shake a sense that he was going to die very soon anyway.
He pops those oxys like Neccos, Diane observed, a Necco lover herself. Hundreds of oxys in a baggie graced the guest bathroom counter. Tom was always tempted to try one.
Go ahead, knock yourself out, Mac had offered, employing his maddening intonation. This was when he allowed the ends of his sentences to trail off plaintively, too exhausted to utter another syllable, thereby establishing himself worthy of pity.
Diane took her coffee out back. I think I’ll go hang with Maryann, she said, which was a joke since she was fairly indifferent to the tortoise.
That tortoise gets all the love it needs, she pointed out in her own defense.
It’s true, Tom fretted about the tortoise and hoarded treats for her. Last week he’d placed a bright hibiscus flower at the mouth of her den, like a lover.
You are an unusual man, it’s like lavishing attention on a rock, was all Diane said.
You’re unkind because you’re jealous, he’d said and she’d said, Why would I be jealous of a rock?
I know you.
Every time he said it, he wondered if it were true. Did he know Diane? Did anyone know anyone?
When he and Mac were kids they did everything together. Both oddballs, they’d expended their boy energies on manufacturing public pranks, often involving explosives and occasionally the police. The prank Tom liked best to recall was the time they’d stuf
fed Tom’s father’s clothes with newspapers and hung their dummy from a string going across a busy street. One of them screamed while the other one manipulated the string. Tom never remembers who did what and Mac doesn’t remember the incident at all.
Out in the sun, adamant even at this hour, Diane is reclining on the blue chaise, her wrinkles stamped furiously into her skin. “Ravaged” is the word that comes to Tom’s mind. She was once so beautiful, he thinks, wistful. Or was she?—actually, not exactly beautiful, but rather approaching beauty, coming right up to its bright edge before sharply veering off somewhere. A little too expressive, perhaps, too given to the easy grimace or the unseemly laugh. It was as if, he realized with a start, she’d always been drooling.
Hi, she said, glancing up, raising her coffee cup.
Have you seen Maryann? Tom slid the screen closed and squinted up at the sky, as if he might spot the tortoise traversing a cloud.
Not hide nor hair, if that’s not a cruel way of putting it.
She must be somewhere. Probably behind the bamboo.
How’s Mac?
No idea. Sleeping.
And you?
I’ve been thinking about terrorists, he said. Which wasn’t true. Terrorists had only just occurred to him. In his mind’s eye they wore cartoon helmets and carried swords. Maybe he’d dreamt about them. He’d been dreaming lately—weird dreams having to do with captivity or of running in molasses and never getting anywhere, which amounts to the same thing as captivity.
Do you fear we’ll be attacked? wondered Diane. Or is this a poorly disguised fear of death?
I don’t know. They just popped into my mind, truth be told. Wearing knight-of-armor hats with visors. I think I should probably make eggs for Mac. He ate nothing last night.
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