Magnetism

  ‘Dad was crazy about Mom.’

  ‘Crazy doesn’t make for a good marriage. There’s more choice for people now. She was pregnant with you, you know.’

  This news should surprise me, but for some reason it doesn’t. Louelle gets up and starts to pull the drapes across the window. We are in the den and it’s that time of the evening when anyone outside can look right into the house. Her hair is no longer full and blonde, it is thinning and white at the roots, and I don’t know when she stopped wearing heels, but she seems to have shrunk. She’s smaller than she was.

  ‘Are you saying she wanted to get rid of me but couldn’t?’

  ‘No, honey. She didn’t want to do that. She got pregnant and needed some help. She wanted the best for her baby, and your dad … he stepped in and helped her out and it suited him, too. It was those times. It was Pete who fathered you but Richard brought you up. Your dad made a good home for you both. Your parents really did love you. You need to speak to your uncle. Phone him.’

  It’s late when we decide finally to go to bed. The news about Dad not being my dad should surprise me, but I feel numb. I take a pill and go into Mom’s bedroom. I still haven’t changed the sheets. I put my head down on her flattened pillow and imagine that I can still smell her there. I want to still smell her. I want to be with her, her arms around me, her hands on mine. I don’t care that we might argue. I don’t care about any of it, good or bad. I just can’t bear that I can’t talk to her about this – about her crappy childhood, her age; about my beginnings; about her and Dad.

  Louelle wakes me in the morning. I know she only meant well, so over breakfast I thank her for telling me what she did. We don’t talk about it again and I don’t ask questions because I don’t need to. I understand because everything suddenly fits. Out there somewhere there is still someone I’m related to by blood, but I don’t know him.

  The following afternoon, when I get back to the house after dropping her at the airport to fly back to Minnesota, I start trembling and my legs stop working right. I thought I knew who my mother was, who my parents were, but none of it was the truth.

  I go to get a cup of coffee and I drop on to my mother’s kitchen floor hard and fast – straight down. I finally crawl to Mom’s armchair in the den, where I sit for an hour and watch how the blood from my grazed knee soaks into the Kleenex and try to recall how tall Mom was when she sat here, compared to me now. Am I closer to her when I sit here now than I was when I sat over there, during the time Louelle was here? I spoke to Mom only the day before Gus phoned, so she hadn’t been dead for long, but still I can’t get over feeling that I’d abandoned her. I didn’t care for her enough. I wonder whether, if I’d paid more attention, I could have known her better, and then she might have trusted me. But it’s all too late.

  2014

  Prince Poopy

  I still have a leave of absence from my work. Jerry said he understood and I know Cotton has recorded it as ill health because we discussed it. I said there was no other way of describing the effect of everything that happened since I had the phone call from Gus to say my mother was dead.

  After the funeral and after Louelle went home, I finally put everything into boxes, closed up her house, left it to the realtor and came back to Oklahoma, ostensibly to figure out what to do next, but in fact, to do nothing at all for a while.

  Today the dog is delivered from the kennels Gus put him in on the day he found Mom. There are people who do such things – people who lifted my mother’s precious body and put her into a box, and people more than happy to collect animals from the homes of the newly deceased and to house them indefinitely, for a price. Then there are young men like this one who transport pets hundreds of miles and convincingly behave as if they care for them.

  The boy, whose badge reads Jordan, ruffles the fur of this nasty little dog and allows it to lick his ear before he passes it over to me and stands waiting for a tip. It’s already cost me a fortune, but that’s not Jordan’s fault. He says that my dog will be pleased to be back home with his mommy. I don’t explain that this is not my animal, and that we have never lived together before, and that he won’t be here for long.

  It squirms in my arms. I drop it on to the floor in the kitchen and command, ‘Wait.’ When it whimpers I tell it to shut up and it lies down contritely, head between its paws. I shut it in there and take the note I want from my pocketbook for the tip. As Jordan takes the offered money our fingers lightly meet and it feels electric. It’s as if I have been alone for a hundred years.

  This, the dog, is the final unwanted thing I will have from my mother. I drove back from Phoenix in a hired U-Haul, which was loaded up with boxes full of papers and her personal items – shoes, jewellery, frail wispy scarves which gave off puffs of Shalimar, some trinkets and memorabilia, handwritten letters mostly from people I’ve never heard of, her collection of perfume bottles, and also the boxes of things she’d kept of mine from childhood and then Dad’s stuff, from when he died and we packed it all up together. All of that is stuffed into my portion of the basement store room, for whenever I have the courage to deal with it.

  After two months away from work, I am no longer being paid, but I am still on the payroll. They can’t replace me and maybe things are mounting up. Jerry’s referred the issue to someone in HR who phones just after Jordan leaves. She asks when I might be back; I have to decide today when I am going to come back. ‘You do know no one can remain on the books indefinitely. We need a date. I’m asking you for a date for the paperwork. The thing is, we’re wondering if you really intend to return at all?’ she says tentatively and too faintly, courtesy of the phone company who never fixed the line properly.

  I tell her to write, that I’m not sure. ‘I can’t hear you properly and my return all depends on variables. Hey, maybe don’t write. I’ll write to you. Soon. I promise. Say hi to everyone.’ I hang up.

  It is an entirely unsatisfactory conversation, from her end. My side of it feels complete and full, a statement of how I am – I don’t know anything. I make promises I won’t keep. I’m out of touch.

  The dog sniffs at my feet. Poopy is spoilt rotten, and I hate him and his moronic name. It might have seemed a cute name for a puppy but ‘Poopy’ is now just a reminder to me that I have to clean up his crap. I can’t see that loving him would ever be possible but I’m not yet ready to put him down. I should find out how long these animals live.

  It’s not disliking dogs which prevents me loving him, I often wanted a dog when I was a kid, but Poopy was her dog and the truth is for a long time I’ve been jealous of him. When I’d visit her, she’d wave goodnight to me, and bend down to scoop him up to go upstairs to her bed, whispering into his tiny, but cavernous, ear. I know dogs don’t actually have expressions, but whenever they left the room together to go off to her bedroom he sure looked smug. Poopy knew where his bread was buttered. She recklessly treated him to handfuls of bacon bits and gourmet food from the delicatessen. He had his own miniature electric blanket and claimed half of her double bed for his own.

  Poopy’s unconditional love was a wonderful thing, she said, and even that made me feel like I’d let her down. I had, I reminded her, tried to be the perfect daughter for years. ‘Well, missed that by a mile. Maybe you should have tried harder,’ she said.

  The dog also happens to be neurotic, and his new, proper poodle cut done courtesy of the kennels can’t be helping. I expect he’s embarrassed because he looks ridiculous and frivolous. The only good thing about him is that he doesn’t shed. He’s lost a little weight since I saw him last, but he was way too fat and he’s still overweight. Now when I stroke the tight brown curls of his coat I waver between a strong desire to push him away from me and another to pick him up and bury my face in his podgy little side.

  Nathan phones to find out how I’m doing but I don’t really want to tell him. He’s a good friend and I like him but he can’t help with this. I ask questions about his family instead and end up listening to what
’s happening with Cassie and their eleven-year-old twins.

  When I hang up, I am again forced to face the fact that I am the last of a very thin, short and crooked family line and all I have to show for it is this pathetic dog now sidling up to my ankle.

  I still haven’t spoken to my uncle. I know I promised Louelle but I think a relationship with anyone else now that Mom has passed is impossible. I’m too old to get to know anyone new. There’s too much to tell, and too much I wouldn’t want to tell, I suppose. She was the one person who always knew me. How can I hope that anyone else might really know me without knowing everything? A lifetime. My lifetime. It’s all too complicated.

  And, of course, the truth is that Pete was not my father. My dad brought me up. He was my real father. Uncle Pete was just a sperm donor.

  I really wish that Dad might have known that it makes no difference to me. I loved Dad, and he loved me.

  In the evening I phone Louelle and we talk for an hour. She says that she’ll come and visit me here sometime and meantime I should try not to worry, or beat myself up about Mom. ‘Have you phoned your uncle?’ she asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you scared?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say.

  ‘Do it anyway. How’s the dog doing?’

  ‘It’s a lot to get used to, that’s all. I guess he’s okay.’

  She says again that she’s going to visit, or I could visit her, and we end up both promising to keep in touch.

  After I hang up the phone, the animal starts to snuffle and whimper and I realise that he must be missing Mom too. His devoted transfer of attention to me should be endearing but it’s not; he ignored me when she was alive so why should I respond to his obvious cupboard love? But, perhaps, the dog is afraid of losing me as well now. He’d have nothing then. I’m all he has, I guess.

  I have allowed him on my bed – down by my feet, where he curls into a warm clump when we go to bed at night. He cries in his sleep and I comfort him and sometimes he wriggles his way up into my arms. But when the sun comes through the drapes and he rushes up and tries to lick my face as soon as I stir, I push him off me, then off the bed on to the floor. I don’t want him to expect me to spoil him as Mom did.

  ‘You’re a legacy and a punishment,’ I say to him now, and he looks up in surprise. He even wags his tail. It says something nice about the dog that he’s grateful for any conversation, however insulting. He just wants to be acknowledged and, unlike every human I’ve ever known, he’s easily satisfied.

  I hear on the phone in the late afternoon the next day that Mom’s house has now been sold. The agent cleared out the furnishings, crockery, knick-knacks that I left, and the appliances. He tells me now that he managed to completely dispose of all that stuff – some the buyers wanted; the rest went to the Goodwill. ‘Made a lot of people happy,’ he says. ‘Your mother would have liked that.’

  I don’t correct him; I agree, because I think that’s the sort of thing I should say.

  Down in the basement I open the first container of my childhood stuff from their house. I find the small blue box that I am looking for. Even though it’s been sealed it appears dusty on the outside, but the seahorse skeleton inside is just the same as I remember. I wrap the whole thing in bubble wrap and label the envelope to Kimberly. I’ve got her new address. It was on the invitation that I didn’t even RSVP. I put a note inside, and a belated proper wedding present – a cheque for two hundred bucks. I try to keep the wording light and breezy: Hope all went well. Thinking of you. Let me know how you are. And I sign it with love and two kisses.

  In the morning I take Poopy with me to the post office and I leave him in the car. There’s a long line to be served. This I can endure, and I can endure the bored false politeness from the girl behind the glass screen as I explain I want it sent special delivery. ‘Uh huh,’ she says without looking up and so quietly that I have to strain to hear her. ‘Anything valuable in it?’

  I suddenly want to tell her that I’m mailing anthrax but, of course I don’t. ‘No,’ I say. She’s just doing her job, and why should she pay attention to every customer? I shouldn’t mind being invisible. When I was a kid, invisibility was my most coveted superhero power, but, now that I seem to have disappeared, I want to be noticed.

  When we get home I boil an egg for me and make scrambled egg for Poopy, which he loves. I plop the food down on his dish – one of my mother’s gold-rimmed saucers. It is intricately decorated with a floral design. I wonder if he’s noticed this loose continuity – that, despite my misgivings, I have honoured the fact that she wouldn’t allow him a doggy bowl – and then I consider whether he knows what a privileged animal he is and suddenly envy grasps me again, like a lump in my throat, because he has someone to do this gentle thing for him to ease his grief, but there is no one and nothing to ease mine. I decide that tomorrow I will have scrambled eggs too and maybe on one of Mom’s plates and maybe I’ll get him a bowl that says ‘Dog’ when I go to the market. It’s not too late to put some things right.

  ‘You’re a lucky little shit,’ I tell him, and he licks my ankle with his tiny tongue until I shove him away with my foot.

  Later I take Poopy with me to the hairdresser’s. When I get out of the car he sidles into the driving seat to wait for me. He’s assuming proprietorial privileges already. This is to be expected and it’s okay. I tell him I won’t be very long and that he should watch the car. He curls up on the seat and settles down when I blow him a kiss through the closed window.

  Dreadful mirrors the length of the shop wall mean there is no escaping the row of women looking their vulnerable worst. For me, the fact that I resemble my mother is underscored. With my wet grey hair scraped back and face lipstickless, I look like her more and more every year. She used to say I looked more like Dad than her. It was an unnecessary lie. My mother was a liar. The fact that I ever believed her about anything angers me.

  When my looks and hers intersected at a good juncture, perhaps at what would have been her pre-menopausal peak in her mid-forties – in her actual mid-forties, I remind myself, when I was around twenty – I didn’t notice our similarities. She had all those crazy hairstyles and I was too busy getting on with discovering life and too preoccupied with myself to consider why she was trying to make all those changes to her appearance. But now before me in the mirror an old woman is creeping up on me or, rather, emerging from within. Dryness, wrinkles, a dullness. A before ad for face creams. A witch.

  I decide I will not return to this place ever again when the girl says that colour and a perm won’t suit the tone of my skin, now.

  The next time they call, it is not Jerry, or his supervisor, making the call, but another administrator I’ve not heard of before now. He explains how short-staffed they are at present, and how I’ve been away three months, as if I couldn’t have figured this out. He says that there is some concern that I do not seem to be ‘proactive’ about resolving this situation. I ask if he is human-resources-trained and he says a clumsy ‘no’, but that he’s taken advice.

  ‘Then, as I’ve told you before, write to me,’ I say. ‘I am not well. These calls distress me. I want you to know that I cannot think like this. Now listen … ’ I pause and he doesn’t speak. He seems stunned into silence – which is very satisfying. It feels as if I’ve spent most of my life hoping that someone might listen to what I have to say. I stand legs apart with my one free hand on my hip and chin in the air. ‘I’m gonna sue you,’ I say finally, and then hang up. I continue to stand with two hands on my hips for a few minutes more and feel calm confidence surge through me. No wonder Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman – even Robin and Commissioner Gordon – took this stance to contemplate things. It’s a powerful stance.

  In the afternoon, I have an appointment to see my primary physician. He says he also wants to discuss how things are going. He expresses some surprise that I still have little appetite and that I still cannot sleep at all. ‘I take the pills you prescribed for my mood, and a
lso make sure I get up in the morning,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t lie around in bed all day. I am trying. The death of a parent is a shock. I want something to help me sleep.’

  ‘What are you doing with your days?’

  ‘I’ve done what you said. I go to the gym and walk the dog – my mother’s dog; I have him now. I keep house. I’ve been doing an art class. I read,’ I lie.

  ‘Friends?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I lie some more. ‘I meet up with friends when I can. They’re mostly working so I can’t do it all the time but I have around ten friends I see regularly.’

  ‘So, what about you? Are you back at your job now?’

  ‘Are you kidding? I can’t work when I can’t sleep. I’m exhausted all the time. It’s an effort to get here to see you.’

  He says I might benefit from some talking therapy, have I thought about that? Ever tried it? I could tell him that I’ve had more than my fair share of time with shrinks over the years, but instead I just say that I have and that it’s a good idea. I thank him. Maybe he could set it up if my insurance will cover it? He writes me up for some more blood work just to see if there’s any reason for me to be so tired all the time. He writes out a prescription for more antidepressants and, finally, some decent sleeping pills, then he shakes my hand. Before I’ve left the room he begins dictating a letter to one of his psychiatrist colleagues.

  I fill the prescription for Lunesta but don’t fill the others. I go home and stuff them away in the kitchen cabinet with my old birthday cards and recipes for stuff I will never try to make, but would like to. If I need them I can find them.

  We go to bed at two a.m. and I lie there with Poopy, who is fast asleep curled up against me. Once again I listen intently to the silence around me, but no one is speaking. Is the fact that Mom has no opinion on my present situation a reward because there is nothing to say, or is she trying to punish me by not sending me a message from beyond the grave? Then, finally, in that shimmering state between wakefulness and sleep, I experience a loosening of reality, a little shake-up that releases the magic into my snow-globe, and I recall the smell of my mother; I remember her firm hand, the look of her smile. I feel sorry for her, as well as for me.