by Marge Piercy
Everyone else had eaten heartily, so perhaps it was her continuing headache that made the food taste off. The guests were Roger Kingsley, one of the partners in Ross’s law office, his wife Barbara, who unlike Daria, was very involved in her husband’s business, and Chuck and Irma Petris, two chubby middle-aged and grey-haired dumplings who looked like brother and sister. They even wore the same aviator-style glasses, popular ten years before. She had trouble following the conversation, which centered on an office complex the Petrises were involved in near Alewife Brook in Cambridge, and the market in condos in Brookline and Allston. Her eyes glazed over. She kept circulating, making sure glasses were filled and putting more cookies out. Nevertheless when the phone rang, Ross jumped up to answer it, disappearing in his study to take the call.
He came swiftly back. “It’s for you. Your father.”
They never could remember to call in on her line. She took it in the kitchen. “What’s wrong with Mama?” came out of her mouth.
“She had a stroke this afternoon.”
“A stroke? Mama?”
“It was … a massive stroke, a massive stroke.” Pops was echoing some official pronouncement. He sounded bemused.
“Where is she now?”
“In the county hospital. It’s a good hospital. The rescue squad came and they worked on her. Then they loaded her in the ambulance and went off with that funny siren they use nowadays. She’s unconscious there in the hospital. In intensive care.”
But she is conscious, Daria thought. She could feel Nina, aware even though unable to see or move, imprisoned deep in her own body. “Can she speak?”
“Naw, Dolly, how could she? It’s a coma. You should get down here as fast as you can. You, Ross and the girls. They say she won’t last long.”
“Pops, when did she have the stroke? When did it happen?”
“Right after lunch. She made a good lunch too. Manicotti, just right. We both had a glass of wine. Then I lay down to take a snooze. I woke up, I heard something. Like something fell, you know?”
“Did she say anything?”
“I called out, ‘Nina, go see what that is.’ Like maybe it was the newsboy throwing the paper against the door again the way I told him not to. I heard her say something but then I dozed off again. I figured she was taking care of whatever happened. When I got up, there Nina was on the floor. What I heard was, the dishes in the rack all fell down when she went over. She was still speaking a little then but she was out of it before the rescue squad came.”
She wanted to ask him how long her mother had lain there but she did not want to seem to be accusing him. On the other hand, he wasn’t prone to guilt feelings she had ever noticed.
“You come down here, Daria, right away. They say there’s no hope. You get the girls and Ross and hop on a plane.”
As she walked toward the living room, Ross came to meet her and pulled her aside in the hall. Numbly she told him.
“Poor kid. That’s hard news. Just let the evening pass. No point dumping our troubles on our guests. We’ll get them out the door early, and then we can talk.”
Afterward she had no recollection of the social evening except that an ashtray broke, a big ugly one in the shape of a deformed swan Ross’s other partner Carl had given them and which must therefore be constantly on display. With faint relief she watched it fall and break. While Ross was saying good-bye to his guests, she started calling airlines. She made reservations on a one o’clock flight the next day. An hour to Logan, an hour before the plane: they’d leave the house at eleven. Tracy would have to follow them. In spite of what Pops had said, the situation was uncertain. She could still feel her mother. She could feel Nina’s conviction of hanging on till they arrived, at least. Nina was not ready to let go.
Ross followed her into their room to spend the night with her. Before he fell asleep he kissed her, while Torte, back in his old dog bed, thumped his tail. She was deeply grateful for his company, even of his gently snoring body on his back and then silently on his side, a parenthesis facing away. She could not sleep.
She had no idea how many aspirins she had taken, to no effect. The most she could do was float in half-sleep and worry. The full impact had not hit her and she tried to stave it off. She fussed instead about what she should take. Must call Palm Beach weather. Her parents lived in Hobe Sound near Fort Pierce, but West Palm Beach was the closest major airport. Take the big blue suitcase? Who could guess how long she might have to stay. Appointments to cancel: dinner engagements, her gynecologist for her annual checkup and pap smear, the talk to the women’s club in Weston, book signing at the Harvard Coop, her class at the Cambridge Adult Education Center where she was teaching pastry skills, Crisp and Crusty 101 she called it. Peggy, her secretary, was due in Tuesday and Wednesday, because Thursday, when she usually came in, was Thanksgiving.
Thursday was Thanksgiving. Should she call her butcher Leo and cancel the goose? Or would she be back? In the hall the kittens hurled themselves against the shut door. She could always cancel Leo later.
Suddenly at three-thirty—she looked at the bedside clock-radio—her headache lifted. As the pain receded, she could not feel her mother. Nina was gone. She’s dead, Daria thought. No, she can’t be. She’s just unconscious the way they thought she was before. She can’t be dead, I won’t let her be dead. But she just isn’t there!
In the dark she wept, slow tears that trickled over her cheek until the pillow was damp. Torte arrived at the foot of the bed, settling with a deep sigh of contentment. Soon he too was softly snoring, man and dog. As the dark finally began to dilute, she longed to rise and tackle some of the multitudinous tasks flipping through her mind, but she did not want Ross to wake and find her missing. The opportunity was too precious. Out of sad events, sometimes people grew closer and a marriage was reknit.
“I can’t charge off suddenly,” Ross said. “We’re in the middle of negotiating with HUD about rehabbing some properties. Neither Carl nor Roger understand the feds’ ways well enough to handle them. I’ll join you if it’s necessary. You see what’s really going on, and we can work out the proper family response. You know I’ll get on the next plane if you really need me.”
“It’s the weekend. Tracy could go with me.”
“Daria! You’re not going to pull her out of college because her grandmother is sick. Robin can’t go rushing off either. Those executive trainee programs are hard as hell to get into. She’s a woman, she has to be twice as good—you’ve said that yourself. When we run today, I’ll tell her.”
“With both of you running together all those mornings, you see Robin five times as often as I do. I want to get closer to her again.”
“Give her some rope, old kid, give her some slack. She’s out on her own. If you want to be close, you have to do it on her terms.”
For Ross to give her advice on the girls was disconcerting. Always she had explained them to him. Always she had explained their needs, their fears, their feelings. Then she had in turn explained Ross to the girls. Daddy didn’t mean that, he was upset about work. “You mean I should run with her too?”
He laughed, patting her shoulder. “You couldn’t keep up with her. I slow her down some myself. She’s good, Daria. We can be really proud of Robin.”
She didn’t want to go south alone. She did not relish dealing with Pops without Ross to mediate. Pops could make her feel inadequate, even at forty-three, for no other reason behind his bravado than that he was male and her father and she was female and his daughter. All the little successes and pleasures and strengths of her life seemed to wither in his presence until she felt like a bloated middle-aged child about to be punished for some obscure deed of omission.
She called Gussie in East Boston (for Augustina: Pops had given every one of them grandiose names—Anthony, Cesaro, Franklin, Daria—except for Joe named for Pops’ own father) to try to persuade Gussie to fly down with her.
“No way,” Gussie whined, “Jackie has an earache again and An
gie’s got a fever. They all were soaked in that storm. I can’t run off and leave my children. You go down and you call me and tell me how Mama is. You don’t have children at home anymore. You can afford to take planes and all that.”
Next she tried Cesaro at home in Lincoln. “You’re kidding, Daria. My office is piled with paper four feet deep and I’m giving a speech at the Chamber of Commerce. I can’t go anywhere unless they carry me out feet first. Pops called last night. He has her practically buried, but I bet Mama surprises them all and pulls through. You see what’s what and let me know. You’re my official delegate.… Is Ross home? I need a few words with him.”
Ross did his insurance with Cesaro, though Cesaro’s office was on Beacon in Brookline, one of Ross’s many kindnesses to her family. Last she tried Tony, leaving a message with his new wife Monica, with whom she still felt awkward. Daria was going to have to fly down alone. She moved her reservation to five, called Florida and started setting up things to run in her absence.
“At least she’s only sick.” Robin seemed flustered. She patted at Daria’s shoulder in a way that seemed a parody of a common gesture of Ross’s toward her. “You have to hope. It’s just awful for you, Mother. I wish Dad could go with you.”
Daria felt better for her conversation with Robin. Robin was never effusive, that just wasn’t her buttoned-down style. Ross had made Robin stand in for the son he wanted. From her birth when he had been stubbornly convinced Daria was carrying a boy, and then even more so after the death of their only son, Frederick Jonathan Walker, who had been born prematurely and deformed, with Down’s syndrome. Freddy had lived ten months and then died of pneumonia. All that time Ross had been tremendous with him, had lavished love and attention on Freddy, fueled by a pity that seemed infinite. She had admired Ross immensely for the ability he had shown to love their baby, whom they had been warned would die very young, all the more so since some brake in her had held back her feelings. She had pitied Freddy and cared for him, but she had not given him the love that Ross had, and she had felt guilty. She tried. But she truly wished he had never been born.
When the doctor had told her that he could not rule out future babies with birth defects, they had fought for months about who should be sterilized. Finally Daria had had her tubes cauterized, in a laparoscopy operation, the so-called Band-Aid operation over in a day that left her with no visible scars.
When she thought of how Ross would come home every night from the JFK Building in Government Center and rush to pick Freddy up out of his crib, she felt like crying again. He was good, she thought, a better person than she was. Daria resolved to become close to Robin again, to be a better wife, to make arrangements today as best she could in the limited time and leave without complaining about flying down alone.
Ross drove her to Logan where they had a drink in the jammed bar after she checked in. Ross drank martinis, but Robin had taught Daria to drink a tequila sunrise, which tasted better to Daria than the whiskey sours she had habitually ordered since coming of age. However, this time Daria remembered she was supposed to be dieting and had only a glass of Perrier. The conversation was studded with silences she caught on like burrs, when she would begin to obsess about Nina, and why she couldn’t feel her mother’s consciousness any longer, and what a stroke meant or felt like. Mostly they got through the half hour till she had to go to her gate by running over the two dozen things that still had to be arranged, cancelled, taken care of.
“I put out food for the kittens on the left of the counter and for Torte on the right. I cooked three suppers. One is in the refrigerator for tonight. You just have to put the casserole dish in the oven, all the directions are taped to it. It’s chicken divan, just heat it through. Two more meals are in the front of the freezer, plainly labelled.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll probably eat out.”
“Not every night. It upsets your stomach.”
“Annette will feed me.”
“That’s another thing. I forgot to tell her. Would you give her a call? I left a message on my answering machine, so you don’t have to answer my phone. But nobody was home at Peggy’s. Would you tell her she doesn’t have to come in this week? Unless I get back. We can make up the days next week.”
“Providing you’re back.”
“Oh, Ross, I can’t stay down there forever. I have a contract to fulfill, deadlines to meet.”
“If she does, you know, die or anything, I’ll take a plane down. I’ll call you at your father’s—or should I call Joe’s house?”
“I don’t know. Let me call you. Tonight after I know. I’ll call around nine. I’ll miss you! Terribly.”
Right after he left her, she called Tracy from a pay phone. At four-thirty Tracy was almost always in her room at the dormitory. “Mama, that’s terrible. Should I go along?”
“I wish you could, but your father thinks we shouldn’t ask you to miss school. I don’t know how long I’ll be down there.”
“I wouldn’t mind, really. I love Florida. Here it’s snowing.”
Daria sighed. Tracy was young, after all. “Just try to get caught up on your classes, in case you do have to fly down.”
“Mama, I’m going cross-country skiing tomorrow with Mac, so if I’m not in my room, I’ll be back later.”
On the plane she had an aisle seat. Mac? That wasn’t the Raphael madonna: that was Gordon. The plane was almost full, so the middle seat beside her was occupied by the wife of the man in the window seat. Daria picked at her cardboard supper and succumbed to a glass of white wine. She believed she was a good mother. She had given her girls love, attention, good schooling, firm guidelines. They always had tasks to do, even if none of their friends did. She felt she had done as good a job as she could with the society threatening to inundate them with its violence, its casual nastiness. She had tried.
When she reviewed her parenting, she never thought as Ross did when he toted up his contribution, of the good school, the advantages, as they were called. No, what she felt she had given them was her attention: her love, her caring, her willingness to listen. A wholehearted being there for them had been her own private criterion for good mothering and then, a loosening at the right time, a lightening up, a relinquishment of the need and even the right to control. Ross, she thought, had not gone that extra step, which was why he was so hard on Tracy nowadays.
But had she been a good daughter? She tried to feel Nina but sensed nothing but silence. How pleased Daria had been when she began to make enough money so that she could afford to be extravagant in small ways, so that she did not feel fully accountable for buying her mother pretty things, a woven silk shawl, a gold necklace, a pin the shape of a silver rose delicately detailed. Did Nina like the gifts? She thought so. It was difficult to be sure, because Nina had the habit of misery. Perhaps Nina thought if she rejoiced in anything wholeheartedly, if she relaxed her litany of complaints, her plainsong of martyrdom, then something far worse would penetrate her defenses, just waiting its chance to rend what was yet endurable in her life.
Daria had called Nina regularly, she had written her faithfully and sent appropriate cards at appropriate times. Every year since her parents moved to Florida, she had flown down with Ross, or if he was too busy for a winter vacation, with the children. Often she would fly down when the girls had their February recess. Since she disliked Florida at Christmas with carols booming over the flat hot parking lots, she vastly preferred going in February when the New England winter had begun to wear on her and the girls usually suffered a string of colds linked by periods of sniffling.
She never stayed more than three days, that was true. It was expensive. They also had to visit Ross’s family, in South Bend, Indiana. They visited Indiana in June, before the Midwestern heat bore down. One year they had gone at Labor Day, because of Ross’s nostalgia for picnics of his boyhood when his father had managed a department store. The temperature had been 101 degrees, the girls had fought continuously and Ross had come down with h
eat prostration.
Why did a sense of failure haunt her tonight? Because she had never made Nina happy? Only Pops could make Nina happy, and he made her unhappy. That was an oversimplification, but it held more truth than not.
When she was little, the third born after Franklin and Joe, she had conspired, she had striven mightily, she had plotted to please her mother. She also wanted to please her father, of course, but so many things and so many people pleased Pops and were pleased by him. He was a widely social man with inner and outer circles of pals from the neighborhood, from the bar, from his various jobs. Her father was what far too many women had always called a fine figure of a man. Maybe that had made Daria fairly immune to appearance. Ross was not conventionally handsome. He had his features: his glorious red-gold hair, his intensely blue eyes. However, he moved always on the edge of awkwardness and he had an underslung jaw. His posture was poor and his cheeks still pitted to the touch from acne he had barely overcome when she met him, in his second to last year of law school. One of Daria’s roommates had said something cruel about Ross: “He’s so good looking when you see him from behind, and then what a comedown when he turns around.” She had been furious, protective of him. She had immediately preferred him to her more conventionally handsome boyfriends for his character, his sense of social and personal responsibility. She had learned from watching her mother’s troubles, her mother who had married the tall dark handsome corner boy.
Yet Nina’s approval was the hope she could not kill off, the fantasy she could not quite resist: that Nina would turn and say at last, “Daria, what you’ve made of yourself! What a good daughter! What a good mother! What a good wife! And people respect you. All those books! Your name in the papers …”
She had the intermittent fantasy that standing beside Nina in the intensive care unit, she could penetrate the fog of the stroke, reach with her mind into her mother’s consciousness. Either she would bring Nina back to consciousness, defying them all, or she would at least say a personal farewell. She wanted to believe that still, but the scene was no longer credible to her.