by Swan Huntley
Da Castelli was dark wood, cherry-red booths, white linen tablecloths, mirrors everywhere. It smelled like garlic bread. The bald maitre d’, whose name we should have known by now but didn’t, took a stack of menus from his podium. “Ciao, ragazze West, follow me.”
Caroline held Mom’s hand, leading her toward the table, and I walked close behind, ready if she fell. We were such idiots at this, such novices. Even the small task of lunch was almost too much, and we watched Mom with wired eyes, full of fear that something bad would happen and it would be our fault. I hoped the people at the restaurant—the older couple by the window, eating pizza, the guy in a Yankees hat at the bar—interpreted this not as fear but as extreme loving cautiousness.
One of the reasons I wanted to have a child was that I knew it would change me into a person who was capable of really caring for another person. My plan, if it happened—an “if” that felt less promising every day—was to hire no nannies at all. To which Susan had said, “You’re not serious. You don’t even know how to iron a shirt.” But I was serious. And (this had come to me later, and I planned on telling Susan the next time it came up) raising a child had nothing to do with ironing a shirt. I planned to hire someone to iron the shirts while I breast-fed, swaddled, got no sleep, sacrificed my life to another human being, etc.
“Your usual table.” The maitre d’ knew how important it was to keep things familiar for Mom. He pulled out a chair.
“Caroline, Caroline, Caroline, Caroline,” our mother was saying.
“What?”
She pointed to the ground. Caroline’s foot was on her coat.
“Shit, sorry,” she said, and lifted it off. We all looked at the wet tread mark left by her Reebok.
“Don’t curse,” Mom said, and decided to ignore the chair and sit in the booth instead. She scooted herself down it in a series of incremental thrusts until her placemat was square in front of her.
Caroline sat next to me instead of Mom. Of course she had to be as close to me as possible.
The good thing about Da Castelli was that Mom liked it now. A year ago she hated it for not being Silvano’s on the Upper East Side, and would order only the veal with rosemary, because that’s what she was so used to saying: “Veal with rosemary, thank you.” The very nice chef here had replicated it for her for months, until one day Mom, for no apparent reason, decided she would have salmon pasta, light on the cream sauce, and a glass of your driest prosecco, thank you.
Now we all ordered the same thing every time. I would have the salad with goat cheese, and Caroline would have three bites of her penne, extra-extra pesto. (Caroline had the palate of a child.) It was an act of solidarity that had evolved by accident.
We took the menus from the maitre d’. Only Mom opened hers. She looked at it confidently, even though I knew the cursive was too small for her to read because it was too small for anyone to read.
“You look good, Mom.” I felt a little bad that I always said this, whether it was true or not, but at least today it was.
“Who did your hair, Mom?” Caroline smiled at the waiter who filled her water glass. She was right. Mom’s hair—a high bun today—was overteased and oversaturated in hair spray. It looked like a bird had misplaced its nest on top of her head.
“The girl,” Mom said.
“Which one?”
“Don’t do that,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Don’t quiz her.”
Caroline buzzed with her usual high voltage. “I thought we were supposed to ask questions about what’s going on in the present.”
“Yeah, but don’t push her.” I managed to say this more calmly than I felt it.
We looked at our mother, who had taken her coat partway off (we should have taken it off for her before she sat down) so that one arm was in and the other was out. With her free hand, she was buttering a slice of warm bread.
“Mom, let me take your coat,” I said.
Mouth full, she shooed me away, but I stood up anyway and freed the other arm before she yelled, “Stop!”
“Okay, okay,” I whispered, to illustrate that she had been too loud. The now empty arm of her rain jacket stuck out awkwardly beside her like it still contained something living inside it.
“Mom, you seriously want to sit on your coat during this whole lunch?” Caroline scratched her neck. It was probably itchy with the dried sweat from her workout.
“Yes,” our mother said, “I would like to sit right here where I am.”
Caroline rolled her eyes and smiled at me. I smiled back. Our shared stress over Mom was the closest thing to a connection we had, and it reminded me that, okay, fine, I was glad she was here. Doing this alone would have been a nightmare.
When the waiter came to take our orders and Mom said hers right, we exchanged another look. “Go Mom,” Caroline said.
“How’s Bob?” I asked her.
“Good. Busy. How’s the shop?”
“Good.”
Caroline hummed along to a song in her head (there was always a song in her head) until her eyes landed on my nails. They were a deep red right now. “Do you get gel or regular?”
I wanted to say, You have ADD. But what I said instead was, “Regular. The gel ruins your nails.”
“Seriously?” Caroline frowned, looking at her own nails, which were fire-engine red and had obviously just been done, probably with gel. “Mom, let’s see your nails.”
“Absolutely not.” Mom curled her fingers into her palms and hid them under the table.
“Mom.”
“Catherine, I’m not interested in you right now.”
“Mom, it’s me, Caroline. Ca-ro-line.” To me Caroline said, “I hate that.”
“Mom, why did you give us such similar names?”
“They are not similar,” Mom said.
“It’s not that,” Caroline said. “She calls me Catherine because she loves you more.”
I made a look like “No,” but everyone knew that was true. For some reason Mom had never really liked Caroline. I knew this not just because I could feel it (everyone could), but also because of the things Mom would whisper to me as a child. “You are the strong one,” she would say, gin-lime breath and her hand firm on the back of my neck.
The bread in Mom’s hand had lipstick all over it, and there was lipstick on her teeth. She was still beautiful, or at least she was obviously someone who had been beautiful once, and she carried herself like that—like a person who understood the value of outward appearances in the world. Despite being old and confused now, she still possessed a grace. I knew I had inherited some but not all of this grace. I moved well, but not as well as my mother in her prime. Caroline had actually inherited more of Mom’s great body, but she moved like a wrestler: hunched shoulders and a waddling hustle.
Her phone rang—some ridiculous rap song that was cool right now—and she answered. After a second she said, “Well, can you go to the store?” and then, more sternly, “Leave Caleb with Amelia and go to Fairway.”
Our mother looked out the window. I would have liked to say that before this, I might have known what she was thinking, but my mother had always been a difficult person to know. She was cold and detached and thought emotions were a handicap. She had said “I love you” only two times that I could remember, both in dire circumstances: when I broke my leg horseback riding and on the turbulent flight to Paris when she was sure we were about to die. She had probably never said it to Caroline. My father had been the warm one. He hugged us; he told us he loved us often. In college a psychic had told me that our mother was the moon and our father was the sun. Caroline, sensing our mother’s distance from her at an early age, had clung to our father like a monkey to a tree. Literally. I remember him trying to leave for work, dressed in his suit, smelling of coffee, and Caroline wrapping her arms around his neck and refusing to let go.
Caroline hung up. “Oh my God. These people can’t do anything without me. It’s like a full-time job telling them wh
at to do.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Apparently my son is out of fish sticks and the nanny can’t figure out to go to the store.”
“I love how your nanny doesn’t even have a name.”
“Tonia. You don’t know her because she’s new.” Caroline dipped a piece of bread in olive oil and set it on her plate.
“Fine,” I said.
“Can you please be nice to me?”
Mom, in her stern voice, said, “They must know you’re the one in charge, Catherine.”
Caroline sighed. “Thanks, Mom.”
I felt bad for Caroline. She seemed like she was coming a little unglued lately. I put my hand on her shoulder. I was aware that I did this not very gently but more like a basketball coach. For a second I thought she might cry. Of the three of us, she was the only one who might actually do that in public.
“Thanks, sis,” she said, her face full of rejection. Caroline so badly wanted to be best-friend sisters. She had always been searching for a deeper connection that I just never felt we had. Sometimes I thought she was living in a fantasy world, a world where life could be like the movies. Caroline loved movies. She had seen everything. It often felt like her actions were taken from a scene in a movie she’d just watched. When she said, “Thanks, sis,” now, for example, I wondered in what film some bleary-eyed actress had said, “Thanks, sis.” Her efforts came off as staged because they were staged, but her desperation was so authentic that it was hard not to feel very sorry for her all the time, and it was exhausting.
When I said “I love you,” it might have been more for me than for her. I was making a serious effort to become softer. I was practicing. It made me so uncomfortable to utter these words that I actually felt dizzy for a second, and distractedly reached for my water glass to avoid eye contact.
Caroline looked surprised (this was only the third time I had said “I love you” to her; yes, I was counting), and then she looked exhilarated. This felt like too much responsibility. In the mirror behind Mom, I could see that my cheeks had turned pink. Mom looked disgusted.
“I love you, too,” Caroline gushed. Of course the actress among us could say those words the most easily. But I sometimes wondered if it was Caroline’s imitations of a cinematic existence that had gotten her so far in her real life. Because after all, she was the married one. She was the one with babies.
Our plates arrived at the table, followed by a moment of worrying about an unexpected reaction from Mom. Sometimes she suddenly hated the thing she usually liked. But today she picked up the fork and twirled her pasta with the rhythm of her old self.
“She’s in a good mood,” Caroline whispered.
“I know.”
“What are you two saying?”
“We’re saying this is good food, Mom.”
Mom looked suspicious, and then her face melted into calm. Her emotions changed so quickly. It was hard to keep up, and there was no real point in trying.
Alzheimer’s, we had learned, was a progressive disease. The longer it went on, the more Mom’s memories would go further and further into the past, replacing the memories of the things that had just happened. “So that by the end,” one doctor explained, “she will have settled on the earliest memories, things from childhood that make her happiest to talk about.” Mom had never liked to talk about the past, especially her early past. She’d grown up without money and she was ashamed of it. She had a stock answer for people who asked her questions about her childhood: “I have lived nine lives—how can I remember them all?”
For now, what Mom liked talking about was our father. How they’d met in Greece (“Ios, fabulous place”) and moved to the Upper East Side (“I thought we had become stiff, but your father assured me it was the only place we belonged”), and their marriage (“Thank God I was pretty, or he wouldn’t have stayed”). Sometimes she called out for him—“Bruuuuuce!”—but most of the time she remembered he was dead.
Mom’s other favorite subject was how her caretakers were thieves. Evelyn had stolen her comb, “the fat one” wouldn’t give her “the good shampoo,” they were all trying to pinch her purse, even though she no longer carried one.
I took a few halfhearted bites and moved the food around my plate. Of course I was thinking about William. I didn’t want to ask in front of Caroline, but I also didn’t know when Mom would be feeling this good again. I started slowly.
“Mom, I met someone you used to know.”
“Yes?” Her eyes focused on me. Sauce dribbled down her chin. I was happy she noticed and wiped it with her napkin.
“Do you remember the Stocktons?”
“Edward and Donna,” she said automatically.
“Who’s that?” Caroline asked.
“Donna and I served on the New York City Children’s Art Fund. It was very successful. We raised a lot of money.” It was obvious she’d said this many times before. She sipped her prosecco. She was almost fooling me into thinking she was back to her normal self. “Edward and your father were great drinking buddies,” she said. “Scotch.”
“When did you meet?”
“Long ago. Your father and I were still”—Mom paused, looking for specifics, and, when she found none, chose something general (Alzheimer’s pointed out how crafty the sufferer could be)—“at the beginning.”
“Do you remember their son, William?”
My mother’s eyes went fiery, then blank. She stopped chewing. She spit the food from her mouth into her napkin and pushed her plate away.
“Mom?”
She wouldn’t look at me.
“Mom.”
She took her prosecco glass by the stem and lifted it, looking out the window at the rain because it was raining now, hard. The sound of the water beating on the pavement drowned out all other sounds in that moment.
It was important to be clear. “Mom, do you remember William Stockton?”
“Who is that?” Caroline asked again.
My mother’s nostrils flared involuntarily.
Caroline said, “Well, whoever it is, Mom’s not a fan.”
“Mom, please.”
“Drop it,” Mom said.
“Whoa,” Caroline said.
“I won’t drop it,” I said.
“Oh my God, are you serious? She’s having a good day, Catherine!”
“Mom,” I said.
“Catherine!” Caroline yelled.
“Mom!” I yelled.
But my mother was done. She was putting her coat on. She was putting it on backwards, but she was still putting it on. “I am ready to leave,” she said.
Caroline was signaling to the waiter for the check.
“Fine, I give up, I give up.” I dropped my napkin on top of my uneaten salad, maybe a little too dramatically. To Caroline I said, “I can’t take this sometimes.”
“I know, I know.” She rubbed my back with the eagerness of a clawing animal.
“Stop.” I moved her hand off me. Where was my phone? No matter what time it was, I would say I was running late. I had to go. This was too much. When I found my phone, I saw that I actually was running late. “I have to go. Caroline, do you—”
“Go.”
“Thanks.” I kissed her sticky face and stood up to kiss my mother, who still wouldn’t look at me. When I said, “Mom,” she held her palm up and turned her face farther away. What else was there to do? I said good-bye and walked out of the restaurant (what was that couple by the window thinking now?) and got into a cab heading back downtown. My driver’s name was Sadat.
•
Of course Mom’s reaction bothered me, but I couldn’t trust it either. Even pre-Alzheimer’s, she’d had a tendency to hate people for no apparent reason, or for reasons that were insignificant and unfair. Growing up, I loathed the moment my mother would meet a new friend. She was extremely judgmental, and if the person fell short of her impossible standards, it was bad. Sophia, for example, my roommate at Sarah Lawrence, was pretty and smart and the kin
d of person who was hard to dislike. But she chewed gum. Constantly. There was always a piece of gum in that girl’s mouth. The day she came over for the first (and last) time, Sophia was midsentence about her love of soccer when my mother said, “I’m sorry, I can’t hear what you’re saying over the smacking of that gum in your mouth,” and left the room. After that, whenever I mentioned Sophia, Mom gave me the silent treatment. Sophia the gum chewer was dead to her.
So. If she didn’t like William (if she even knew who he was; maybe she was confused about that), it was probably for a very stupid reason.
I got worked up and pissed off in the cab, thinking about my mother and cataloguing all the things in my life she had ruined. She had barely raised us herself, and then she had sent us to boarding school. She had alienated us. No, I wasn’t a victim. I was simply taking note of the facts.
We were stuck in traffic again. I called Jeff and left a terse message about the blinds. I called Vera to ask her where she had put the flowers. “At the front, Catherine.” She sounded defiant. “Good,” I said, and hung up.
I inhaled deeply, told myself to relax. I noticed I wasn’t breathing, which was something I’d been noticing a lot lately.
When I finally got to Equinox, I waved at the desk person, who tried to stop me. “Excuse me, ma’am, can you scan please?”
I kept walking as I said, “I’m in a hurry. Can I do it later?” I had no intention of doing it later. That girl should have known who I was by now.
In the locker room I wondered yet again why these women sauntered around so sexually. Were we in a porno? Did the tween-looking model with the belly-button ring really need to sashay to her locker like that? It wasn’t jealousy. Even when I had had that body, I had walked like a normal person.
Sex with William was going to be great. I may have had a history of being nonsexual (this had been a big problem between me and horny Fernando), but I was so attracted to William. I wasn’t worried at all.
I changed into my workout gear—all black Lululemon, purple Nikes—and met Chris by the treadmill. Chris was a gorgeous gay black man with crystal studs and the most defined quads I had ever seen. He liked to put his hands on his hips to air out his biceps, which looked like perfect dunes on a postcard horizon. I loved Chris—he never failed to put me in a better mood. When he saw me coming, he said, “Hey baby!” and gave me a kiss. “Get on up here!”