Follies

by Ann Beattie

  “Mom,” he says breathlessly.

  “Your sister tells me every time we see each other that she’s fifty-one. She’s preoccupied with age. Being around an old person can do that. I’m old, but I forget to think about myself that way. Your sister is in the backseat right now thinking about mortality, mark my words.”

  My brother’s knuckles are white on the wheel.

  “Are we going to the hairdresser?” she says suddenly. She taps the back of her neck. Her fingers move up until they encounter small curls. When Tim realizes that I’m not going to answer, he says, “Your hair looks lovely, Mom. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Well, I always like to be punctual when I have an appointment,” she says.

  I think how strange it is that I was never dressed up as Cleopatra, or as a ballerina. What was wrong with me that I wanted to be a tomato?

  “Ma, on Halloween, was I ever dressed as a girl?”

  In the mirror, my brother’s eyes dart to mine. For a second, I remember Vic’s eyes as he checked my reactions in the rearview mirror, those times I had my mother sit up front so the two of them could converse more easily.

  “Well,” my mother says, “I think one year you thought about being a nurse, but Joanne Willoughby was going to be a nurse. I was in the grocery store, and there was Mrs. Willoughby, fingering the costume we’d thought about the night before. It was wrong of me not to be more decisive. I think that’s what made you impulsive as a grown-up.”

  “You think I’m impulsive? I think of myself as somebody who never does anything unexpected.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” my mother says. “Look at that man you married when you didn’t even really know him. The first husband. And then you married that man you knew way back in high school. It makes me wonder if you didn’t inherit some of your father’s fickle tendencies.”

  “Let’s not fight,” my brother says.

  “What do you think other mothers would say if I told them both my children got married without inviting me to their weddings? I think some of them would think that must say something about me. Maybe it was my inadequacy that made your father consider us second-best. Tim, men tell other men things. Did your father tell you about the other family?”

  Tim tightens his grip on the wheel. He doesn’t answer. Our mother pats his arm. She says, “Tim wanted to be Edgar Bergen one year. Do you remember? But your father pointed out that we’d have to buy one of those expensive Charlie McCarthy dolls, and he wasn’t about to do that. Little did we know, he had a whole other family to support.”

  Everyone at the Oaks is referred to formally as “Mrs.” You can tell when the nurses really like someone, because they refer to her by the less formal “Miz.”

  Miz Banks is my mother’s roommate. She has a tuft of pure white hair that makes her look like an exotic bird. She is ninety-nine.

  “Today is Halloween, I understand,” my mother says. “Are we going to have a party?”

  The nurse smiles. “Whether or not it’s a special occasion, we always have a lovely midday meal,” she says. “And we hope the family will join us.”

  “It’s suppertime?” Miz Banks says.

  “No, ma’am, it’s only ten a.m. right now,” the nurse says loudly. “But we’ll come get you for the midday meal, as we always do.”

  “Oh, God,” Tim says. “What do we do now?”

  The nurse frowns. “Excuse me?” she says.

  “I thought Dr. Milrus was going to be here,” he says. He looks around the room, as if Jack Milrus might be hiding somewhere. Not possible, unless he’s wedged himself behind the desk that is sitting at an odd angle in the corner. The nurse follows his gaze and says, “Miz Banks’s nephew has feng-shuied her part of the room.”

  Nearest the door—in our part of the room—there is white wicker furniture. Three pink bears teeter on a mobile hung from an air vent in the ceiling. On a bulletin board is a color picture of a baby with one tooth, grinning. Our mother has settled into a yellow chair and looks quite small. She eyes everyone, and says nothing.

  “Would this be a convenient time to sign some papers?” the nurse asks. It is the second time that she has mentioned this—both times to my brother, not me.

  “Oh, my God,” he says. “How can this be happening?” He is not doing very well.

  “Let’s step outside and let the ladies get to know each other,” the nurse says. She takes his arm and leads him through the door. “We don’t want to be negative,” I hear her say.

  I sit on my mother’s bed. My mother looks at me blankly. It is as if she doesn’t recognize me in this context. She says, finally, “Whose Greek fisherman’s cap is that?”

  She is pointing to the Sony Walkman that I placed on the bed, along with an overnight bag and some magazines.

  “That’s a machine that plays music, Ma.”

  “No, it isn’t,” she says. “It’s a Greek fisherman’s cap.”

  I pick it up and hold it out to her. I press “play,” and music can be heard through the dangling earphones. We both look at it as if it were the most curious thing in the world. I adjust the volume to low and put the earphones on her head. She closes her eyes. Finally, she says, “Is this the beginning of the Halloween party?”

  “I threw you off, talking about Halloween,” I say. “Today’s just a day in early November.”

  “Thanksgiving is next,” she says, opening her eyes.

  “I suppose it is,” I say. I notice that Miz Banks’s head has fallen forward.

  “Is that thing over there the turkey?” my mother says, pointing.

  “It’s your roommate.”

  “I was joking,” she says.

  I realize that I am clenching my hands only when I unclench them. I try to smile, but I can’t hold up the corners of my mouth.

  My mother arranges the earphones around her neck as if they were a stethoscope. “If I’d let you be what you wanted that time, maybe I’d have my own private nurse now. Maybe I wasn’t so smart, after all.”

  “This is just temporary,” I lie.

  “Well, I don’t want to go to my grave thinking you blame me for things that were out of my control. It’s perfectly possible that your father was a bigamist. My mother told me not to marry him.”

  “Gramma told you not to marry Daddy?”

  “She was a smart old fox. She sniffed him out.”

  “But he never did what you accuse him of. He came home from the war and married you, and you had us. Maybe we confused you by growing up so fast or something. I don’t want to make you mad by mentioning my age, but maybe all those years that we were a family, so long ago, were like one long Halloween: we were costumed as children, and then we outgrew the costumes and we were grown.”

  She looks at me. “That’s an interesting way to put it,” she says.

  “And the other family—maybe it’s like the mixup between the man dreaming he’s a butterfly, or the butterfly dreaming he’s a man. Maybe you were confused after your stroke, or it came to you in a dream and it seemed real, the way dreams sometimes linger. Maybe you couldn’t understand how we’d all aged, so you invented us again as young people. And for some reason Tim got frozen in time. You said the other wife looked like you. Well, maybe she was you.”

  “I don’t know,” my mother says slowly. “I think your father was just attracted to the same type of woman.”

  “But nobody ever met these people. There’s no marriage license. He was married to you for almost fifty years. Don’t you see that what I’m saying is a more likely explanation?”

  “You really do remind me of that detective, Desperate Mason. You get an idea, and your eyes get big, just the way his do. I feel like you’re about to lean into the witness stand.”

  Jack Milrus, a towel around his neck, stands in the doorway. “In a million years, you’ll never guess why I’m late,” he says. “A wheel came off a truck and knocked my car off the road, into a pond. I had to get out through the window and wade back to the highway.”
/>
  A nurse comes up behind him with more towels and some dry clothes.

  “Maybe it’s just raining out, but it feels to him like he was in a pond,” my mother says, winking at me.

  “You understand!” I say.

  “Everybody has his little embellishments,” my mother says. “There wouldn’t be any books to read to children and there would be precious few to read to adults if storytellers weren’t allowed a few embellishments.”

  “Ma! That is absolutely true.”

  “Excuse me while I step into the bathroom and change my clothes.”

  “Humor him,” my mother whispers to me behind her hand. “When he comes out, he’ll think he’s a doctor, but you and I will know that Jack is only hoping to go to medical school.”

  You think you understand the problem you’re facing, only to find out there is another, totally unexpected problem.

  There is much consternation and confusion among the nurses when Tim disappears and has not reappeared after nearly an hour. Jack Milrus weighs in: Tim is immature and irresponsible, he says. Quite possibly a much more severe problem than anyone suspected. My mother suggests slyly that Tim decided to fall down a rabbit hole and have an adventure. She says, “The rabbit hole’s a more likely explanation,” smiling smugly.

  Stretched out in bed, her tennis shoes neatly arranged on the floor, my mother says, “He always ran away from difficult situations. Look at you and Jack, with those astonished expressions on your faces! Mr. Mason will find him,” she adds. Then she closes her eyes.

  “You see?” Jack Milrus whispers, guiding me out of the room. “She’s adjusted beautifully. And it’s hardly a terrible place, is it?” He answers his own question: “No, it isn’t.”

  “What happened to the truck?” I ask.

  “Driver apologized. Stood on the shoulder talking on his cell phone. Three cop cars were there in about three seconds. I got away by pointing to my MD plates.”

  “Did Tim tell you he just got married?”

  “I heard that. During visiting hours, his wife took Donna aside to give her the happy news and to say that we weren’t to slight him in any way, because he was ready, willing, and able—that was the way she said it to Donna—to assume responsibility for his mother’s well-being. She also went to the hospital this morning just after you left and caused a commotion because they’d thrown away her wedding bouquet.”

  The phone call the next morning comes as a surprise. Like a telemarketer, Tim seems to be reading from a script: “Our relationship may be strained beyond redemption. When I went to the nurses’ desk and saw that you had included personal information about me on a form you had apparently already filled out elsewhere, in collusion with your doctor friend, I realized that you were yet again condescending to me and subjecting me to humiliation. I was very hurt that you had written both of our names as ‘Person to be notified in an emergency,’ but then undercut that by affixing a Post-it note saying, ‘Call me first. He’s hard to find.’ How would you know? How would you know what my teaching schedule is when you have never expressed the slightest interest? How do you know when I leave my house in the morning and when I return at night? You’ve always wanted to come first. It is also my personal opinion that you okayed the throwing out of my wife’s nosegay, which was on loan to Mom. So go ahead and okay everything. Have her euthanized, if that’s what you want to do, and see if I care. Do you realize that you barely took an insincere second to congratulate me and my wife? If you have no respect for me, I nevertheless expect a modicum of respect for my wife.”

  Of course, he does not know that I’m joking when I respond, “No, thanks. I’m very happy with my AT&T service.”

  When he slams down the phone, I consider returning to bed and curling into a fetal position, though at the same time I realize that I cannot miss one more day of work. I walk into the bathroom, wearing Vic’s old bathrobe, which I hang on the back of the door. I shower and brush my teeth. I call the Oaks, to see if my mother slept through the night. She did, and is playing bingo. I dress quickly, comb my hair, pick up my purse and keys, and open the front door. A FedEx letter leans against the railing, with Cora’s name and return address on it. I take a step back, walk inside, and open it. There is a sealed envelope with my name on it. I stare at it.

  The phone rings. It is Mariah Roberts, 2003 Virginia Teacher of the Year for Grade Three, calling to say that she is embarrassed but it has been pointed out to her that children dressed as starfish and sea horses, dancing in front of dangling nets, represent species that are endangered, and often “collected” or otherwise “preyed upon,” and that she wants to reimburse me for materials, but she most certainly does not want me to sew starfish costumes. I look across the bedroom, to the pointy costumes piled on a chair, only the top one still awaiting its zipper. They suddenly look sad—deflated, more than slightly absurd. I can’t think what to say, and am surprised to realize that I’m too choked up to speak. “Not to worry,” I finally say. “Is the whole performance canceled?” “It’s being reconceived,” she says. “We want sea life that is empowered.” “Barracuda?” I say. “I’ll run that by them,” she says.

  When we hang up, I continue to examine the sealed envelope. Then I pick up the phone and dial. To my surprise, Vic answers on the second ring.

  “Hey, I’ve been thinking about you,” he says. “Really. I was going to call and see how you were doing. How’s your mother?”

  “Fine,” I say. “There’s something that’s been bothering me. Can I ask you a quick question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Donna Milrus said she saw you and Banderas having a fight.”

  “Yeah,” he says warily.

  “It’s none of my business, but what caused it?”

  “Jumped on the car and his claws scratched the paint.”

  “You said he was the best-trained dog in the world.”

  “I know it. He always waits for me to open the door, but that day, you tell me. He jumped up and clawed the hell out of the car. If he’d been scared by something, I might have made an allowance. But there was nobody. And then as soon as I swatted him, who gets out of her Lexus but Donna Milrus, and suddenly the grocery bag slips out of my hands and splits open…all this stuff rolling toward her, and she points the toe of one of those expensive shoes she wears and stops an orange.”

  “I can’t believe that about you and Banderas. It shakes up all my assumptions.”

  “That’s what happened,” he says.

  “Thanks for the information.”

  “Hey, wait. I really was getting ready to call you. I was going to say maybe we could get together and take your mother to the Italian place for dinner.”

  “That’s nice,” I say, “but I don’t think so.”

  There is a moment’s silence.

  “Bye, Vic,” I say.

  “Wait,” he says quickly. “You really called about the dog?”

  “Uh-huh. You talked about him a lot, you know. He was a big part of our lives.”

  “There was and is absolutely nothing between me and my secretary, if that’s what you think,” he says. “She’s dating a guy who works in Baltimore. I’ve got this dream that she’ll marry him and leave the dog behind, because he’s got cats.”

  “I hope for your sake that happens. I’ve got to go to work.”

  “How about coffee?” he says.

  “Sure,” I say. “We’ll talk again.”

  “What’s wrong with coffee right now?”

  “Don’t you have a job?”

  “I thought we were going to be friends. Wasn’t that your idea? Ditch me because I’m ten years younger than you, because you’re such an ageist, but we can still be great friends, you can even marry some guy and we’ll still be friends, but you never call, and when you do it’s with some question about a dog you took a dislike to before you ever met him, because you’re a jealous woman. The same way you can like somebody’s kid, and not like them, I like the dog.”

  “You l
ove the dog.”

  “Okay, so I’m a little leery about that word. Can I come over for coffee tonight, if you don’t have time now?”

  “Only if you agree in advance to do me a favor.”

  “I agree to do you a favor.”

  “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

  “No.”

  “It calls on one of your little-used skills.”

  “Sex?”

  “No, not sex. Paper cutting.”

  “What do you want me to cut up that you can’t cut up?”

  “A letter from my sister-in-law.”

  “You don’t have a sister-in-law. Wait: Your brother got married? I’m amazed. I thought he didn’t much care for women.”

  “You think Tim is gay?”

  “I didn’t say that. I always thought of the guy as a misanthrope. I’m just saying I’m surprised. Why don’t you rip up the letter yourself?”

  “Vic, don’t be obtuse. I want you to do one of those cutout things with it. I want you to take what I’m completely sure is something terrible and transform it. You know—that thing your grandmother taught you.”

  “Oh,” he says. “You mean, like the fence and the arbor with the vine?”

  “Well, I don’t know. It doesn’t have to be that.”

  “I haven’t practiced in a while,” he says. “Did you have something particular in mind?”

  “I haven’t read it,” I say. “But I think I know what it says. So how about a skeleton with something driven through its heart?”

  “I’m afraid my grandmother’s interest was landscape.”

  “I bet you could do it.”

  “Sailboat riding on waves?”

  “My idea is better.”

  “But out of my field of expertise.”

  “Tell me the truth,” I say. “I can handle it. Did you buy groceries to cook that woman dinner?”

  “No,” he says. “Also, remember that you dumped me, and then for a finale you married some jerk so I’d be entitled to do anything I wanted. Then you call and want me to make a corpse with a stake through its heart because you don’t like your new sister-in-law, either. Ask yourself: Am I so normal myself?”