by Anne Tyler
“Hush, now,” Laura said. “Shall I make us a little supper? There’s bound to be something in the icebox. Would anyone like an omelet?”
And off she went, still in her galoshes, tugging at her coat. She is the cook in the family—you can tell it by her figure. I myself couldn’t have taken a bite right then. I was too sick at heart. I set my feet upon a needlework footstool and said, “What would help me most now is a good long rest. I’ve walked far more today than I should have.” I was talking to Jeremy, but you would never have known it for all the reaction he gave me. “See my feet?” I asked him. “How puffy?”
He didn’t answer.
“We couldn’t get a taxi from the funeral parlor. It was hard enough to find one at the railroad station, and evidently no one thought to meet us.”
But all Jeremy did was lay his hands very lightly upon his knees, as if they would break.
I sat erect in Mother’s wing chair and looked all around me. Everything imaginable seemed to be crowded into that parlor. Chipped figurines, a barometer, a Baby Ben that worked and a grandmother clock that didn’t, a whole row of Kahlil Gibran, a leaning tower of knitting magazines, peacock feathers stuck behind the mirror. Cloudy tumblers half full of stale water, a Scrabble set, a vaporizer, a hairbrush choked with light brown hair, an embroidery hoop, a paperback book on astrology, an egg-stained shawl, doilies on doilies, Sears Roebuck catalogues, ancient quilted photo albums, a glass swan full of dusty colored marbles, plants escaping their pots and sprawling along the windowsill. On the table beside me, a bottle of Jergens lotion and a magnifying glass and a patented news-item clipper. (How she loved to clip news items! They stuffed all her envelopes, and for years I unfolded them one by one and tried to figure out their relevance to me. I never could. Puppies were rescued from sewer pipes, orphaned rabbits were nursed by cats, toddlers splashed in wading pools on Baltimore’s first summer day. Nothing that meant anything. I learned to throw them away without a glance, as if they had come as so much padding for her wispy little notes.) Beneath the clutter, if you could see that far, was scrolled and splintery furniture so scrawny-legged you wondered how it stood the strain. I felt anxious just looking at it. I placed my fingertips to my forehead, warding off one of my headaches. “Well, Jeremy,” I said. “I suppose I should hear how this business happened.”
Jeremy raised his eyes, not to me but to a point on the wall.
“How Mother went.”
“Oh. It—I was—it happened like this.”
“You don’t have to make a long story of it, just tell,” I said. I know I shouldn’t snap at him that way.
“I had made a new piece,” Jeremy said.
“What?”
“Piece. A new piece in my studio.”
“Oh yes.”
That’s what he calls them: pieces. He pastes them together and calls them pieces. Well, they’re surely not pictures. Not even regular collages, not that intricate, mosaic-like way he does them. He has had this drive to paste things together ever since he was old enough for scissors and a gluepot. He started off at Mother’s feet, dressing paper dolls, and in grade school he moved up to scrapbooks. Other boys play baseball; he made scrapbooks. One for famous people and another for foreign places and another for postcards. (Photos of hotels, mostly, with X’s on minute little windows twelve stories up—”Here’s where my room is!”—sent to Mother by a cousin.) Then he began his pieces. Mother thought they were wonderful, naturally, but as far as I could see they were just more of the same. More cutting, more pasting. Little people made of triangles of wrapping paper and diamonds of silk. No definite outlines to them. Something like those puzzles they have in children’s magazines—find seven animals in the branches of this bush. I couldn’t see the point of it. “Then what?” I asked.
“I wanted her to see my piece. I went down and brought her up and at the top of the stairs she just fell down, she fell down and I saw she was dead.”
All his eye for detail goes into cutting and pasting. There is none left over for real life. What did Mother say, climbing the stairs? What were her last words? Was she out of breath? Holding her chest? Did she give him any kind of a look when she had fallen? (Maybe she looked at him and thought, Good heavens. Is this what I’m dying for? A little paper quilt put together by a middle-aged man?)
“Go on,” I said.
He looked blank.
“Tell me,” I said (already tired out by the thought of all I would have to ask), “had she been doing any complaining about chest pains?”
“Oh, Mama never complained.”
That was true, but another person could have read the signs anyway. Whenever she had health problems—gas, indigestion, a little trouble with bowels—she did her own doctoring. Took herb tea and patent medicine and refused all meals. Many’s the time I have eaten lunch with her sitting across the table watching, nothing in front of her but a steaming cup and a pint bottle of Pepto-Bismol, eyes following my spoon. “Aren’t you eating, Mother?”
“No, darling, but pay it no mind. I’m sure I’ll be all right.” Another sip of herb tea, a tablespoon of Pepto-Bismol. But Jeremy (if he was even at the table, and not off pasting things together and having lunch sent up on a tray) only ate on with his eyes lowered and never appeared to notice. He was so used to being the sickly one himself. I am sure he never changed. Mother could have trailed a line of digitalis tablets clear across to his place mat and he would only have asked for more custard.
Laura came to the dining room doorway and said, “I’ve laid a little supper on. Will you have some?”
“I’m sorry, I just don’t believe I can,” I said.
“Oh, Amanda. Try, dear. We have to keep our strength up.”
So I came, but while Laura and Jeremy were settling themselves I went out and made myself a cup of hot milk. It was all I felt up to. I stood at the stove, surrounded by dirty dishes and objects out of their proper places, while in the dining room I heard the steady clinking of china. They could eat through anything. When I came out I saw their plates just heaped with food, omelets and rolls and several kinds of cake. I said, “Well, don’t come to me with your indigestion, that’s all I have to say.” Which stopped them for a moment; they wiped their mouths and looked up at me with identical foolish expressions. But then they returned to their plates and paid me no more mind. Spreading butter on one roll after another, spinning the lazy Susan to find some new kind of jelly. “Try the gooseberry, Jeremy. I know you’ve no appetite, but—” Jeremy, who has a sweet tooth, ate half a pineapple upside-down cake. I saw him. And just the bought, gluey kind; Mother never bestirred herself to bake. Laura served it to him sliver by sliver, the politest little portions you ever saw, and he watched each piece arrive as if it had nothing to do with him but when he was finished half the cake was gone. Laura ate most of the other half. Yet she was so dainty about it! She took such tiny bites and set her fork down on her plate betweentimes. Jeremy chewed in a halfhearted way, the same as he does everything. Rolling the food around in his mouth. And then to top it off Laura said, “When this is over I’m going to have to go back on my diet.” As if Mother’s passing were a picnic! A vacation! Some kind of eating spree! But before I could point it out to her in walked Howard, who has the south front bedroom. “Oh, excuse me,” he said, and stood teetering over us. He is a beakish young man with glasses, a medical student. For as long as I can remember his room has been inhabited by medical students. They pass it down from one to another along with a shelf of fifth-hand textbooks and the number of the nurses’ dorm scrawled on the wallpaper beside the hall telephone. It is convenient, of course, to know that that particular room will always have an occupant, but the students are generally noisy and untidy and their hours are not at all regular. I would have dispensed with them long ago. And their manners! This Howard, for example, never even troubled himself to offer his condolences. All he said was, “I see you people got here okay.”
“Howard,” I said, “I wonder if you might have any
idea where our suitcases are.”
“Me? No, ma’am.”
“Well, there went our one last hope,” I told the others.
Laura said, “Won’t you join us for supper, Howard?”
“Oh, I have a little something in the kitchen,” he said. He scratched his head a moment and then left, and I could hear him out clattering around in the silverware drawer. No wonder the kitchen was in such a state. What do you expect, letting people wander in and out like that? I have been trying for years to make Mother lay down a few ground rules. “This is not a genuine boarding house,” I told her. “You never contracted for them to eat here, they’re supposed to take their meals in restaurants.”
“Oh, well,” she said, “I know you’re right, Amanda.” Yet she never did a thing more about it, and as a result look what has happened: ants in the upstairs rooms where people have carried their sandwiches, roaches in the kitchen, strangers dirtying pans and littering counters and stuffing the cupboards with their various foods. The student before Howard, what was his name? He kept a cake tin in the icebox with a label Scotch-taped to it: CAUTION BACTERIOLOGICAL SPECIMEN DO NOT DISTURB. All a deception, of course; there was only cake inside. But nevertheless it was a disturbing thing to come across as I was searching for an egg or a bit of lettuce, and more than once it’s put me off my feed.
Thinking of boarders reminded me; I set my milk down and said, “There’s a lot we have to talk about, Jeremy.”
He looked startled.
“There’s the question of where you will live now.”
“Live? Oh, why—won’t I just go on living here?”
“In this great house? Nonsense. I suppose you’ll have to move in with us.”
“But I’d rather, I don’t think—”
Whenever Jeremy is upset he has a hesitation in his speech, not a stutter exactly but a jagged sound, as if the words were being broken off from some other, stronger current of words deep inside. It was plain he was upset now, and I couldn’t help but feel insulted. Did he think I wanted him, for heaven’s sake? Turning our ordered life topsy-turvy, trailing his little snippets of paper across our carpet? We would have to move to a larger apartment, and give up the one we’d had for nineteen years and grown so used to. But you can’t always pick and choose. “We’ll put the house in the hands of an agent,” I said. “Someone with a talent for selling. Heaven knows he’ll need it.”
“Oh, but I just, I believe I’ll just stay here, Amanda,” Jeremy said.
“Jeremy, we are not going to argue about this,” I said. Then I rose and went out to the kitchen to get a dab of sugar for my milk. Giving myself a chance to grow calm again, although that turned out to be impossible with Howard standing at the sink eating directly from an ice cream carton. I ignored him. I returned through the swinging door to the dining room and what did I see? Laura and Jeremy reaching simultaneously toward a coconut layer cake, their hands suspended and their faces sheepish when they saw I had caught them. I am always being put in the role of disciplinarian even when I am not at school. It isn’t fair. I never ask to be. “Go on then, eat,” I told them, and I resettled myself in my chair and stirred my milk, pretending not to care. Inside, though, I felt that I had reached the limit. The headache had descended after all, spreading through my temples and down the back of my neck. I get terrible headaches. No one who hasn’t had them can imagine. “Right now, Jeremy,” I said, “you are going through a difficult time and I know that you’re not thinking clearly. We’ll put off discussing your plans till later. But I’ll say this much: I expect you to come with us to the funeral parlor tonight. It’s the least you can do. You would surely not allow your sister and me to walk alone in the dark.”
“Oh, well, Amanda, I was thinking we might stay home tonight,” Laura said.
Which was certainly not what I had expected. I had thought I would have to drag her away from the casket. “How would that look to Mother’s visitors?” I asked her.
“There may not be any visitors, and even if there are I’m sure they’ll understand.”
“You may stay home then,” I told her. “Jeremy and I will go alone.”
Jeremy said, “Well, but—”
“You can’t refuse to visit your own mother, Jeremy.”
“I don’t think I want to go,” Jeremy said.
And Laura said, “Why don’t we all stay home?” With her face bright and hopeful—protecting Jeremy. Jeremy sat slumped in his chair, mashing cake crumbs with his fork. His lips were pressed outward. Sometimes I wonder if Jeremy possesses some strength I have never suspected, some perverse, inner strength that keeps him an immovable lump in spite of all our nudges. Wouldn’t it be easier just to give up and act the way he is supposed to? “I don’t understand you, Jeremy,” I said. “You did see her on the stairs, after all. It’s not as if you could spare yourself the sight. And this will be much better, even, now that they have her all—”
“Can’t you just let him be?” Laura said.
I set my milk cup down as gently as I could manage. Another person would have slammed it. I said, “I’ll count on you to clear the table, Laura. It was you and Jeremy who did all that eating. I’ll just go and change the sheets in Mother’s room before I leave for the funeral parlor, shall I?” Then I rose from the table, keeping a tight hold upon myself. I tried my best not to notice how my temples were pounding.
We were going to have to stay in Mother’s room because all the others were full of strangers. The only time we ever saw our own room was at Christmas and Easter, when Mrs. Jarrett went off to visit her married daughter in California. And even then we saw it in an altered state, with Mrs. Jarrett’s hats stacked in our closet and her dresses shoved to the back of it. Oh, this house had closed over our leavetaking like water; not a trace of us remained. I had never been bothered by it before but I was that night. In Mother’s bedroom, which was crammed with half-soiled clothes and wall mottoes and empty coffee cups and pictures of kittens wound up in balls of yarn, there was not so much as a photograph of me at any age. Just Jeremy looking frightened on her nightstand, eleven years old and wearing a Sunday suit that barely met across the front. Beside him our father, in a sterling silver frame. Now there is a sample of how Mother did things. Our father was a building contractor who left us thirty-four years ago—went out for a breath of air one evening and never came back. Sent us a postcard from New York City two weeks later: “I said I needed air, didn’t I?” “Yes, he said that as he left, I remember he did,” said Mother, dim-witted as ever. She kept his brushes on the bureau and his shaving mug in the bathroom, never removed her ring, never to my knowledge shed a tear, not even a year and a half after that when he was killed in an auto accident and the insurance company notified her by mail. And look on her nightstand! There he was, big and dashing in an old-fashioned collar and a villain’s pencil-line mustache. Handsome, I suppose some might say. (As a small girl I admired my father quite a bit, though not, of course, after he deserted.) And what did he see in Mother? Why, it’s written on the bottom of his photograph. “For Wilma, with my deepest respect.” She was a cut above him, a storeowner’s daughter born to be pretty and frail and useless—which, Lord knows, she was. Spent her mornings tinkling halfway through popular tunes on the piano before she trailed off uncertainly, her afternoons painting forget-me-nots on china plates, her evenings in the front porch swing giving herself the barest ripple of motion every now and then with the toe of her shoe. From a distance I suppose that a building contractor could find her mighty impressive. How was he to know she would stay frozen in china-painting position for the rest of her life?
I stripped the bed and made it up fresh with sheets from the cedar chest. I folded the old sheets and placed them in the hamper. I picked up the clothes that Mother had left scattered everywhere. Meanwhile I could hear Laura clattering dishes and talking on and on—to Jeremy, I supposed. Never a break for breath, even. She thinks she is such an authority, just because she was married and widowed once upon a
time. Thinks she is qualified to speak about life. Well, she was only married a year and never had children, and her husband was no more than a boy anyway. A hemophiliac. Died from a scratch he got opening a Campbell’s soup can. How does that make her so worldly wise? But there she was just rattling on, handing down her pronouncements. Was it me they were discussing?
Laura used to pull Jeremy around the block in a little red wooden wagon when he was just a baby. He didn’t learn to walk until he was nearly two; that’s how well she took care of him. He had no need to walk. After the ride she would hoist him up by the underarms and lug him into the house, the two of them grunting and red in the face. Then Mother mashed up a little banana for him or peeled some grapes—peeled them!—and set them into his mouth one by one. “You love Jeremy more than you do me,” I told her once. I said it straight out. She didn’t deny it. “Well, honey,” she said, “you have to remember that Jeremy is a boy.” I thought I knew what she meant, but now I’m not sure. I thought she meant that boys were more lovable, but maybe she was just saying that they took more care. That they were weaker, or more accident-prone, or more likely to make mistakes. Who knows? It doesn’t matter what she meant; the fact is she did love him more. And next to him, Laura. The pretty one, who in those days was only slightly plump and had hair that was really and truly golden. Me last of all. Well, I couldn’t care less about that now, of course. I never even think about it. But I did at one time.
I hung armloads of Mother’s clothes in her closet, beside other clothes cram-packed in any old way with their sleeves inside out and their hems half unstitched. They had a used smell, sweet and sickish. Some she had saved for forty years in the hope that they would come back into fashion; she imagined that the rest of the world was as stagnant as she was. “And see?” she would say, draped in some filmy frayed prewar dress, slumped before the full-length mirror, “people are wearing these again, I saw the same hemline in the park only yesterday.” The only thing she bought new were shoes, racks and racks of them, top quality. She believed in changing her shoe wardrobe often to safeguard the shape of her foot. As if she pictured herself still soft-boned and malleable, still a child. Which she was, in a way.