30 Pieces of a Novel

by Stephen Dixon

  The Bed

  His mother died in his arms. “You shouldn’t keep telling people that,” his wife said. “It sounds as if you’re boasting.” “But she did die in my arms. At home, in her hospital bed there. I was holding her, had her propped up.” “I know; you’ve said. But from now on with other people, when you’re telling them about it—this is only a suggestion—just say she died at home. Peacefully at home, because that’s how you said it was, except for that last terrible moment which she might not have even been aware of.” “I’m sure she was; I saw it when she opened her eyes after they’d been closed so long.” “That could have been involuntary; some automatic physical reflex. You raised her up, she started vomiting, her eyes opened.” “But it was what I saw in her eyes that made me feel she was suddenly conscious.” “All right. I’m not arguing with you, sweetheart. But the thing with your arms—which is true, I’m not disputing that either, if the way you say it happened happened that way.” “What other way could it have? It’s not something I’d forget or make up. I was there with the woman who takes care of her weekends.” “Ebonita. I know all that too. And she seemed as devoted to your mother as the woman who looked after her during the week.” “I was sitting beside my mom. Ebonita pointed out this phlegm rising in her mouth. It was white and loose, almost like water, and a little bubbly. Maybe it wasn’t phlegm, I now realize. Some other juices from inside, but we thought it was and a good sign because we’d been trying to get the congestion out of her chest for a day. Raising her, trying to get her to cough up. But there was a lot of this stuff right below the top of her lips, just staying there. She’d been having trouble breathing for a day and I didn’t want to take her—send her, have an ambulance bring her, I mean—to the hospital, because even the doctor said—” “And he was right. Of course, he should have come over and seen her to say this, but he was still right. All they’d do at the hospital is stick needles in her, try to keep her alive for another day, if they were lucky, and maybe even help get rid of her before she would have normally passed away at home. But we’ve gone over this. What I’m saying now, though, is that some people might think this is just another terrific story you’re telling. Not ‘terrific.’ That the dramatics of it is equally important or even more important to you than what you were feeling at the time and are no doubt feeling something of now.” “I feel terrible, as low as I’ve ever felt. Or did feel that low for a few days and now just feel terrible, almost as low. And just talking to people about it, and right here with you—” “I know, dear, I know, I’m sorry. But you still don’t want to convey the inaccurate impression that you’re focusing on certain aspects of what happened to make it sound more interesting. In your arms. Hugging her and crying out the things you did at the end. Who wouldn’t want his loved one to die in his arms like that: peacefully, for the most part? Not in a hospital where they shoo you out of the room at precisely that moment or a little before and then come out later and say she’s gone.” “That’s why I didn’t call EMS or that Haztollah or whatever that ambulance service is to take her to a hospital. I knew she was going. The doctor, from everything I told him, said so over the phone, and she’d been declining for a few weeks, and it was clear to Ebonita and me that this was it. I wanted her to be comfortable at home. She’d told me long ago that that’s what she hoped for also: no tubes, and to die in her own bed. Well, it wasn’t her own bed, it was this nursing service loan of a bed. And it wasn’t even in her own bedroom, it was her dining room converted into a bedroom so she could be taken care of better, but at least it was her own home. And, she said, surrounded by—well, there was just me and Ebonita there and some old ghosts, maybe. Dad, my brother who didn’t live till what, five? but did live in that apartment his last two years. I’m sure she would have wanted you and the kids there—but that couldn’t be, and I wouldn’t have wanted the kids to see it—and the main person who took care of her, Angela, but she was off for the weekend and we couldn’t reach her by phone. And also Ebonita’s daughter, just sitting there in a chair in the room and not looking scared or saying anything, just curious, as if this were an interesting new thing she was seeing, though Ebonita told me her daughter had been in the hospital room the moment her own grandmother died. So maybe that was it, reliving it, but I think more out of not knowing what to do and curiosity, the death and the way I was taking it. I didn’t know how to tell her to leave, go to the kitchen, take in a movie, anything, but get out of here, please, this was a private moment for me, the worst there was; or for Ebonita to tell her—” “You were right; Ebonita should have if the girl didn’t have the sense to leave herself. How old is she?” “Fifteen? Seventeen?” “Then old enough to know. And I can see why you’d be unable to say something yourself. Anyway, dear, I overheard you talking to Frederick about your mother and thought I should say something to you.” “He asked me how I was. He’d called to make a lunch date. He didn’t know she’d died. So I said I was feeling the worst I’d ever been in my life, and then—after he asked—that it was because my mother had died on Sunday.” “You said she died in your arms on Sunday.” “So that’s what I said, then.” “And that’s why I brought it up. But of course do what you want. I just felt I had to point it out.” “Okay. I’ll remember. You’re probably right. Anything else?” “No, nothing. I’m making myself tea. Like some?” and he says, “No, thanks,” and she grabs his hand and squeezes it and looks up at him sympathetically, he fakes a quick smile, she says, “I understand,” and wheels herself to the stove to get the teakettle. He should help her, but he suddenly feels in his throat and eyes a cry coming on and wants to be alone. He goes into the living room and sits but no tears come and the swelling in his throat and the itchy feeling around his eyes go away. What’s that mean, he’s finally adjusting to his mother’s death? No, he’s sure he’s in for a few more bad days of it. The tall memorial candle’s burning on the fireplace mantel. He brought it from New York, something the funeral home gave him along with several cardboard boxes to sit in mourning on, all of which he left behind but one, and lit it the day after they drove back from the funeral. So it’s been lit for more than two days and seems to have burned less than a third of the way down. His wife wanted him to put a dish under it but he said, “Why? That’s for regular candles when the wax is dripping. This one’s inside a long glass cylinder, and it couldn’t be safer, because the lit wick gets lower down the longer the candle burns.” She said the glass might break, burning for so many days—“Have you felt how hot it is? I did, just as a test, and wish I hadn’t, or had licked my fingers first, for it burned me”—and he said he knows it gets hot, he doesn’t have to touch it to find out, but he’s sure that that glass is the kind that won’t break from such a small flame, because when she felt it did she also see how thick it is? He gets up and touches the glass; it’s hot but didn’t burn his fingers though would have if he’d kept them on longer, and maybe the heat from the bottom of the glass will do something to the mantel wood when the candle burns way down, but he has about three days for that. Where’s the camera? and sees it on the piano and, using the flash, takes a picture of the candle for some future day when he may want to remember exactly what it looked like, Jewish star and funeral home name on it and everything. It could also turn out to be an interesting photo, a few condolence cards and the little Prayers and Meditations book, which he took off a side table in the funeral home sitting room her coffin was in, lying beside the candle, if maybe come out looking too much like the front of one of those cards. He opens the book to “Yizkor in Memory of a Mother.” What’s Yizkor mean again? Not “again”: he never knew. Certainly not “may,” which seems to be the translation in each of the seven Yizkors in the book: “For a Wife,” “For a Son,” et cetera, and one just “Yizkor Meditation.” The prayer in the book he likes best, or maybe it’s a meditation, is “At a Mother’s Grave,” but the book stayed in his pocket at the burial—the rabbi did all the reading—and he’s only read the prayer to himself in bed a few times before
reading a couple of sad poems and shutting off the light and going to sleep. He sits on the box with the book, starts reading very low the Yizkor for a mother, something he’s done when nobody was around at least once a day since she died. But he shouldn’t be reading while sitting, should he, even on this mourner’s box? And he doesn’t want to stand up and read, or read it any louder—his wife might come in and say something like, “You, never a believer or worshiper or even someone who observed a single Jewish holiday or ritual, not even circumcision if we’d had a son, now going on every day like a yeshiva bucher?”—and reading it silently standing up or seated doesn’t mean anything. Later, when the kids are asleep and his wife is in one of the other rooms, he’ll read it or another prayer or meditation while he stands by the candle, as he’s done the other times since he’s been home. He’s cried every time while reading from the book—oh, don’t go into it. He moves to the easy chair and opens the New York Times, tries reading an Arts article, but thinks of her. He’s almost always thinking of her, or in ten minutes or so of doing something else he always seems to return to thinking of her, and sometimes of her reading this same paper, but the late edition, which she loved doing every morning over coffee till she couldn’t anymore because of her cataracts. Regrets: why didn’t he ever drive her down here to see this house? They bought it more than three years ago and she never saw it once. But he’s gone over that. She was frail, couldn’t take the train or plane anymore, four-hour car trip would have been too tiring and maybe even painful for her, it would have been too much for him to deal with, taking care of her and also seeing to his wife. Two wheelchairs in one house: in his head he didn’t like the way they looked together, especially at the dinner table and on the little patio outside, though he didn’t think it would have bothered his wife. But he could have made the car seat comfortable for her, stopped as often as she wanted along the way, driven more slowly than he normally does, taken Angela with her, put them up for a few days, Angela in the basement, his mother on the day bed in his wife’s studio, an intercom hooked up between them, or moved his kids to the basement and had Angela and his mother in their adjacent bedrooms, driven them home and then returned the same day. The last two summers when he drove back from Maine he told his wife he was definitely going to have his mother down for a few days this fall and she said it’ll be difficult but it was all right with her, and that was the last he did of it. She would have loved that he owned this house and lived in such a neighborhood: tall trees, small hills, lots of birds, and perfumy air, nursery school playground across the street and all those children’s voices, house on one level and with ramps, extra-wide doors, and a bathroom big enough for a wheelchair to turn around, hospitable supermarket nearby. Regrets: why didn’t he call her every day as he’d promised? Remembers his father saying lots of times, “When I got married and moved out I called my mother at least once a day till she died and saw her twice a week for dinner or lunch,” and his mother saying a number of those times, “It’s true, your father was an unbelievable son: almost too good, to where he neglected his own family.” He remembers thinking this was a nice thing to do and he’d do it too with the phone, once he grew up and moved away from home. He called her every other day or every third day and for the last year she frequently didn’t know who he was or took him for someone else: her dead brother, his father, a name he didn’t recognize, and when he asked who’s that? she said she’d never heard the name before and why’d he bring it up? But in a minute or so, after he kept saying, “It’s me, Mom, Gould, your son, Gould,” recognizing him and saying at first she didn’t hear him because he was speaking so softly or it was her bad hearing or the girl didn’t put her hearing aid in right this morning or the hearing aid must need a new battery or never worked right: “You’ll have to take me to the place we got it at. I forget where, but you’ll know or Angela must have it written down. But you will come around to see me soon, won’t you, dearest? I’d really like that,” and he’d say, she knows he’s in Baltimore, right, and not in New York? and weekdays there’s his job, not too demanding, but also driving Fanny to and from school, and weekends the kids always have so many things going for him to drive them to, and Sally, of course, takes some of his time, but he’ll be there in two weeks, he promises, take her to lunch on a Saturday, and she’d say, Two weeks sounds like such a long time when one has nothing to do, but if it’s the best he can do she’ll have to live with it. Or sometimes she’d say, “That was dumb of me to think you were Dad. Probably because I didn’t get enough sleep last night. All I could do was run my life through my mind and not like most of it, so aggravation there too. And also wasting away here watching inconsequential TV shows the girl likes makes me stupid and I forget what year it is and where I am. Tell me, is this my home I’m in?” and he’d say, “Your old apartment for almost sixty years. It’s just it’s a different kind of bed than you’re used to and it’s in the dining room because your bedroom was too far away from the bathroom, so maybe you don’t recognize your surroundings because of that,” and she’d say, “All that’s probably true. Though I still have a suspicion this isn’t my regular home, but then why would you want to trick me?” Regrets: sometimes he’d call and Ebonita or Angela would answer and say, She’s resting (or on the potty or sitting under the water in the shower), and he’d say he’ll call back in an hour but usually never did. Why? Because he’d think, he already called that day; his duty was done, Angela will tell her he called and she’ll be pleased by it though disappointed she missed him and later think something came up at his home where he couldn’t call back. When actually talking on the phone to her the last few years was often frustrating, where she couldn’t understand what he was saying and he’d have to shout for her to hear him, and sometimes she’d give the phone to Angela and say, “You talk to him and find out what he wants; he’s speaking loud enough but I still can’t make out a word.” He should have called back each time and, if she was still on the toilet or had gone from the toilet to the shower or bed, say he’ll call back again in an hour or two, or sometime that day, and then call back as he said. Regrets: he’d tell her he was coming to New York to see her for the day, and half the time he’d call a day or two before to say something had come up at home—Sally, or one of the kids got sick—so he’ll have to put off the trip till next week. Usually his Sally or sick-kid excuse was a lie: he didn’t want to make the trip, too tired to or thought he’d be, or he had work to do and wanted to do it at home and not on the train, or heavy rain was forecast for New York, so he wouldn’t be able to wheel her to a neighborhood restaurant, which made getting her there—which he wanted to because he found having lunch with her at home suffocating—even with Ebonita or Angela helping him, tough because he’d have to get her and the wheelchair in and out of cabs and sometimes she was a dead weight. He also wouldn’t be able to take her to the park after lunch, which she liked doing and frequently fell asleep for an hour or two there while he watched people and read. Regrets that he found having lunch with her at home, suffocating. Regrets that she slept so much when he was in the park or even at home with her the last couple of years, but nothing he could have done about that. Regrets that he didn’t take her down to the river after lunch, which he thought of doing lots of times on hot days, but it was about fifteen minutes away while the park was much closer. But he shouldn’t have disappointed her so much, since that’s what she obviously was—her voice, or silence after, or, “That’s all right, your family comes first, and maybe you have some important outside things to do too”—whenever he told her he couldn’t come in this weekend as planned. Regrets: why didn’t he initiate conversation more and follow up the questions he did ask with more questions about what she was talking about when they went out for lunch or spoke on the phone or sat in her home the last few years? The calls to her were usually over in a couple of minutes, sometimes less; a few perfunctory questions, and mostly the same ones: “How are you? You feeling all right? Eating okay? Anyone drop by lately? Do anyth
ing interesting recently?” “Like what?” she’d say. “When you’re not here, and I’m not going to a doctor with one of the girls or your lovely cousin, all I do is sleep and eat a little and listen to the radio or TV.” A couple of times he said, “Then anything interesting on the radio or TV?” and she said, “I can barely see or hear them,” and then silence on his part and after she asked him a few things about his family—“Your kids all right? Your wife okay? Does that new medicine she’s taking work? Listen,” she said, maybe twenty times, “I hear they’re discovering new things all the time for what she has; is she involved with any of them?”—she’d say, “So, I guess that’s it; I can’t think of anything else worth mentioning. Thanks for calling; you’re a doll. I love you,” and he’d say, “Same here, Mom; Sally and the kids send their love too, and I’ll call you tomorrow,” and she’d say, “I look forward to it; I always do.” Face it, he usually wanted to get off the phone with her as soon as he could. The same conversations, same difficulty in holding those conversations, and whatever he told her she seemed to instantly forget. But he should have faked it, put more life in his voice, asked friends for jokes and told her them—she liked a good joke—and laughed at the punch lines if she didn’t. Thought of lots of different things she might want to talk about, repeated what he had to say over and over till she finally got it. Prepared questions to ask her before he dialed. Stayed on the phone five minutes, ten minutes, even thought of follow-up questions to ask her, wrote all these questions down, even. She must have thought sometimes, He’s got to be bored with me by now; probably thinks I don’t understand a word he says and haven’t a brain left in my head. That I’m old so I’m demented. He’s probably only calling out of a sense of duty. I should ask him more about him and his family, not just general questions but specific ones—“What courses are your girls taking in school? How are they doing in them? Do you have to help them much with their homework? I’m sorry, I know you once told me, but what grades are they in again?”—but I can never think of this when we’re on the phone. I should also call him more, but so many times I don’t think he’s glad to hear from me. It mostly seems I’m getting him at a bad time, nothing personal against me. At the end of his calls to her, she often said, “Tell me, what’s the best time to reach you by phone?” and he always said, “Anytime after five is good; there you’re almost guaranteed I’m home. If I’m not and you speak to Sally or one of the kids, I’ll call you soon as I get your message, unless it’s way too late.” She hadn’t called him more than three or four times in the last two years, and one day she called him twice and just an hour apart, not remembering she’d already called him. “Do I have your phone number? I don’t think you ever gave it to me,” she said several times, and he’d tell her, “It’s in the little phone book on your night table. It’s also taped to the inside of the cabinet door above the kitchen phone, and I know Angela has it written down in a couple of other places in case she suddenly has to get me. But don’t bother calling me; I like calling you and I try to every day,” and she said things like, “I know, and it’s very sweet of you.” Why didn’t he ever talk to her about some of these things? “You know me, Mom, I was never much of a talker on the phone, and it has nothing to do with you if our talks are short. And if I’m relatively quiet or not too conversational, we’ll call it, at the restaurants we go to or when we’re sitting around at home, it’s only because the long train ride’s made me sleepy, or I had to get up earlier than usual for a Saturday to catch the train and get here by noon, or I did lots of schoolwork or something the previous night and didn’t get enough sleep, so there, also, it was nothing you did.” Regrets: when he came to New York the time before the last, almost a month ago—and another regret is why he didn’t come a week or two after that, or every week—and walked into the dining room where she was sitting in a chair and said, “How are you, Mom?” and she looked up, no smile, which she normally gave, that she was glad to see him, and said, “Who are you?” why didn’t he get on his knees and hug her and say, “Mom, it’s me, Gould, your son; oh, my mom, why don’t you recognize me?” Instead, he stood there, saying, “What do you mean, who am I? It’s me, who else could it be? I’ve come to see you, all the way from Baltimore, and take you out to lunch and spend the day with you,” and she said, “We’re going out? That’s nice. I wasn’t expecting it, nobody said anything,” and he said, “But I called last night to remind you and Angela, and we’ve been talking about it the last two weeks. And you’re dressed for going out, aren’t you? so you must have known,” and she said, “Then I don’t remember, but please don’t make it an issue. I’ll have to go to the bathroom first and then I’ll be ready—call the girl,” so regrets there for upsetting her. Did he apologize? He’s sure he did but forgets. He got her wheelchair—“Want to walk it outside?”; she said, “Right now I feel too weak to”—and got her into the chair, pushed her outside; “The girl; shouldn’t we invite Angela? We haven’t taken her to lunch in a while,” and he said, “Not today, I just want to be with you alone and I’m sure she appreciates the break, especially when she’s working the weekend this week too,” when it was really because Angela picked at her food and took a half hour longer to eat than his mother—turned around in the areaway, and pulled her up the steps to the sidewalk. “Want to try walking the wheelchair now? It’s good exercise for you, and only a little way,” and she said, “I don’t feel I can move a step. I’m sorry, but I don’t know what’s wrong with me today,” and he said, “Mom, come on, you should only do what you’re able to,” pushed her to the restaurant she liked going to most, table by the patio window she liked sitting beside so she could watch the people passing, after that to a coffee bar on the same block—he got her a decaffeinated coffee but told her it was regular, that’s what Angela said the doctor wants her to have if she does have coffee; he’d prefer her to stick with hot cocoa or a mild tea—another regret? No, and even though she wasn’t supposed to have a drink either, and if a drink then just a wine or beer, he got her her favorite: Jack Daniels on the rocks with a little water and twist of lemon, “Because what else are they going to take away from me,” she once asked, “food and air too?”—and a flaky Danish-like pastry she loved, with peaches and walnuts in it. She asked that day at both places and while he wheeled her along the street the same kinds of questions she usually did, and some of them several times: “You feeling okay? Your wife. Everything considering, she’s all right, no change? And your lovely daughters, they okay too? They doing well in school? Of course they are, look who are their parents,” and he said, “Sally, maybe, but not me, and I mean by that their brains.” “How old are they now? … I can’t believe it, where’d all the time go? You still teaching? You have enough money? You know, if you ever need a loan … I don’t have much but you can have it all, because what good is it going to do me? Where do you live these days? Not in New York? How far is Baltimore from here? That much? I didn’t realize. How long have you lived so far away? You don’t think, if you looked, there’d be something closer that was as good?” Another thing to regret: that he’s lived down there the last fourteen years? They kept his wife’s old student apartment near Columbia, sublet it more than they used it. Whenever they came up, though, and stayed there he saw her every day for lunch and sometimes dropped by around five for drinks and cheese and crackers. Regrets that they didn’t come up more. The drive was long and tedious for him, but he should have done it more often. She loved seeing the girls. And before their older one started middle school, when absences began counting against her, they stayed at their apartment all of June and three weeks during the Christmas break instead of what they’d done the last four years, ten to eleven days. And when she was still in nursery school and kindergarten, they came up for around five weeks and he maybe skipped seeing his mother one or two days. Then he wheeled her home, didn’t ask if she wanted to walk the chair, knew she couldn’t, helped her onto the bed—“Suddenly I feel very tired. In the restaurant I was fine. I didn’t ha
ve anything alcoholic to drink, did I?” and he said, “Let’s just say I kept diluting your Jack Daniels with water so you wouldn’t drink it almost straight and get looped there,” and she said, “Now that was a mean thing for you to do”—sat beside her a couple of hours while she napped, and then got up and leaned over her and said, “Mom, Mom, listen, I have to be going and I want to say goodbye,” and she opened her eyes and smiled and said, “Thank you, my darling,” and he said, “Thank you, nothing; it’s been my pleasure. I love taking you out and seeing you, and I just wish I could do it more often; I’ll try to,” and she said, “That’d be nice. You’re the only one who’ll give me a drink and I get to eat a good lunch and enjoy myself so much with,” and he kissed her forehead and cheek and then her forehead again—it was wet, didn’t feel warm when he touched it with his fingers. Maybe she was sweating because the room was too warm or it was the drink or it could be one of the medicines she’s taking or she had a fever. Can a forehead be cold and the body feverish at the same time? Another regret is that he didn’t tell Angela about it. Just knocked on her door, and she said through it, “Yes, sir?” and he said, “I’m going.” Maybe the infection was only just setting in and in a few weeks gradually grew into that awful hoarse cough and labored breathing—spread to her lungs, he’s saying—and was what finally killed her. “She’s been declining for months,” her doctor said on the phone the day before she died. “She won’t pull through this time, a hospital’s not going to improve her chances, so it’s mainly a matter of where you think she’ll be most comfortable. I always tell the patient’s immediate survivors that, unless there’s physical or emotional suffering involved on either side, home’s the ideal.” Then she shut her eyes, smile gone, seemed to fall back to sleep, and he got his coat and briefcase, stuck his books and newspaper in it, looked into her room, she seemed to be sleeping peacefully, thought of going over to kiss her, didn’t want to disturb her, and left. He’ll call her when he gets home, he thought, walking to the subway. She’ll most likely be up and will like hearing from him. He didn’t. Another regret. Would have been so nice. “Mom, I just got in,” she’d ask where, he’d say, “From New York, where I saw you today: I took the train, and first thing I’m doing—I don’t even have my coat off—is calling you.” No, too obvious. “Mom, I just got back from New York, where I saw you, and wanted to know how you are and if you had your dinner.” Forget the dinner. Just “How are you, what are you doing?” She’d have said, “I’m all right, I guess,” and, “Nothing, as usual.” Another regret is that he didn’t stay overnight in their apartment, come over in the morning, and take her out for breakfast or if it was raining or too cold, made her breakfast in her apartment with things he brought over and knew she liked—bagels, Canadian bacon, strawberries, Friendship pot cheese, a special fruit juice—and then left for the train. Or just stayed longer by her bed that afternoon. Read, maybe taken a quick walk. Then had a drink with her when she awoke: Jack Daniels on the rocks for him (it was the only hard stuff in the house, though he could have bought a bottle of vodka in his quick walk), a very watered-down one for her, because there wasn’t any great need for him to get home before the kids went to sleep, and it was Saturday, so they’d still be up at ten or eleven and he could see them if he got on the train by seven or eight. And the kids didn’t need to be driven anywhere early the next morning that he remembers. Even if they did, he could have called Sally and asked her to get a friend to drive them or the parent of the kid whose house his daughter was going to; that it was more important he go home later that day than he thought or to stay the night in New York and leave tomorrow around noon because his mother seemed to be getting weaker—she was definitely getting weaker and thinner and less lucid, and he wanted to spend more time with her while he had the chance. Misses her, can’t stop thinking of her. Well, it’s not as if he tries to stop. He’s just always thinking of her, or a lot. He can be doing anything, taking a run, a shower, shaving, slapping something on toast, sitting in a chair eating or reading, talking on the phone (he’s only been able to talk—won’t even pick up the phone when it rings; his kids and wife have to and then tell him who it is—to a few close friends and his mother’s accountant and the cousin who looked in on her in New York the past few years and is now going through her own mourning and calls up to talk to him or Sally about it: “How strange. I never knew I’d feel this way once she was gone. I almost thought it’d bring relief, to me and her, though I can’t especially say how, since she for the most part was in relatively good health for someone her age and I enjoyed her company, and now I grieve that I won’t be catching the One-oh-four bus to see her and stopping in a store along the way to get her a buttered soft roll,” and he said “Same here, though not the relief part. But honestly, Lottie, I can’t talk about it yet like this”), when suddenly she pops into his head, if he isn’t already talking about her, like with Lottie, and he often starts crying. He thinks about writing a poem about her. Anything: her youth, what she meant to him, times with her when he was a boy, her relationship with his dad, one composed of just phrases and things she liked to say. He doesn’t write poems. Last was a series of them to Sally a few weeks after he met her and the first time she broke off with him, titling them “2S1,” “2S2,” through “2S11” and finally “2Sdozen.” He threw out his copies of them about a year later but wonders if she kept the originals he sent her one by one after he wrote them, sometimes going outside at two and three in the morning to drop them into a mailbox. He takes out his pen and starts writing, cries during part of it, and finishes in a few minutes. It all just came. He’d stop about ten seconds between each completed sentence before going to the next. Should he write another? No, this one says what he wants. He reads it and changes only the second “laid” to “lay.” “How could my mother not be alive?/ My mother has always been alive. I clutched her around and cried, ‘Mommy, Mommy, it’s all right, Mommy,’ and then she died. I laid her sideways on the pillow and she lay there always. She has always been there. When I come to this city I will be coming to see her. Things won’t change, will they? How could my mother not be alive? How could she? Things don’t change. I’ll never be the same. Speak to me, Mommy, speak to me. It all goes on and I cannot stop.” He’d like to be able to—of course he would, but finish the thought—to be able to type it up, change nothing else in it, and stick the original into an envelope and send it to her. He’d like, he’d like. And Express Mail. To go to the post office and get one of those Express Mail envelopes and send it that way so she can get it early the next day. And with a note in it. Now that’s enough. But what would he say? Dear Mom, I’m so glad you can receive this, your loving son, Gould. So what to do with the poem? He tears the page out of the notebook and puts it inside the book he’s been reading but hasn’t read more than a few pages of since he took it on the train to New York the day she died. Phone rings and he yells out, “I don’t want to speak to anyone now, no one, not even my cousin,” and his wife says from her studio, “I understand, but what should I say if it’s for you, you’re not here?” Phone’s still ringing. “Say, if they don’t already know, that my mother died and I am here but I don’t feel I can talk to anyone now but her and my kids and wife. That I’m low—feeling as low as I’ve ever felt in my life.” “You want me to say that?” “Pick up the phone if you want and say anything, but please stop its ringing; the damn noise is killing me,” and she picks it up, and he quietly moves to the kitchen by her studio and listens as she says, “No, no, it’s coming along; he’s very upset, of course,” and he says, “Upset? What a word for it. I don’t know exactly what I am but I’m a helluva lot worse than upset,” and she’s probably looking his way, shaking her head, doing things like that and the expression to go with it—he can’t see her nor she him—and she says, “Please, Gould, don’t make it any tougher,” so her hand’s probably on the talking part of the receiver, and he says, “Sorry, no harm meant, but what can you expect? Though that’s no excuse,” and goes back t
o his chair in the living room. The cat comes in and heads toward him, and he says, “Listen, I don’t want to pet you and you’ve already been fed plenty, so go away,” and the cat gets by his feet and seems ready to jump into his lap. “Did you hear me? I don’t want that,” wagging his finger. Cat jumps up, and he puts him on the floor. Jumps right back up, and he says, “What is it with you? I know you know something’s wrong and you’re trying to comfort me but not … right … now,” and with one hand underneath he holds him over the floor from about three feet up and lets him drop. The cat scoots up onto the chair opposite him, stares at him after he settles himself, and then tucks his front paws under his chest and closes his eyes for sleep. “You understand,” he says, low, “that it’s that I don’t want to touch or be touched by my wife either for any kind of loving or solace or easement. My kids, yes, to hold them, but right now, and for I don’t know how long but I’m sure no more than a couple of weeks, I don’t want to be held. Oh, what am I saying?” and thinks he’s got to do something. Sitting here or lying on his bed or walking around the neighborhood, all he can do is think of his mother and what he didn’t do for her. He goes into the bathroom and pees, though he had no urge to, just to get up and do something. Move, move, keep busy, that’s the ticket. Folds the towels on the rack. Then folds them the more intricate but right way, horizontally in half and then vertically in thirds and then over. Then he sweeps the bathroom floor and washes it with diluted ammonia and rags. On his knees, just as his mother didn’t do; she used a mop but he can’t stand those things, the stringy ones, which you have to wring out by hand if you don’t have a bucket with a wringer, or the sponge mops they have that are too damn slow to use, where you have to squeeze them with that metal piece every two square feet of mopped floor. Rags are the best, rags, rags: rinse them under the kitchen faucet after you’re through and then throw them into the washer, though make sure you don’t wash any clothes or linens with them—all that lint. Same with the kitchen: sweeps it, then spills diluted ammonia on the floor and gets on his knees with the rags and starts swabbing. “What are you doing?” his wife says; “the smell,” and he says, “Cleaning. I feel I want—I don’t feel, I just want, and I don’t mean by that correction anything but that I want everything to be clean, tidy, neat, even sparkling. And it’s something to do, I need something physical to do.” “If that’s the case, after you’re done, the shed needs emptying out and tidying up.” “Good, will do,” and he finishes swabbing and then dries the floor with paper towels. But first finish cleaning the house, he thinks, and vacuums every room, changes the kitty litter box, remakes all the beds, scours the kitchen sink, wipes down the refrigerator and stove and countertops, takes the clothes from yesterday out of the dryer and folds them and puts them away in various drawers, cleans the toilets and tub and shower stall and refolds the towels in the other bathroom, goes outside and cleans out the shed, has a whole bunch of things from it and the basement to take to the dump, and puts them all in the van, yells out to his wife, “I’m off to the dump,” and goes. While he’s driving he thinks, Turn the radio on to one of the classical music stations, but there might be voices, news, promos, thank-yous for contributing to a recent fund drive, and so on, and he really doesn’t want to hear music right now either. He thinks his mother would have liked to come to the dump if she were here. Knows, unless she was too weak or tired to. Places like dumps, the kids’ music schools, just ordinary chores; driving in neighbor hoods she hadn’t been to before, or not for long, and especially shopping with him, and especially grocery shopping when she stayed a week or two in Maine with them each summer, she liked. A week; his wife felt that was long enough for either of their mothers, but he always felt bad sending her back to the hot city and wanted it to be more. She’d be in the front seat. Last time she was in the van was about six weeks ago when he drove her and his family to dinner at his cousin’s apartment in New York. No, last time was when he drove her home after dropping off his family at their apartment, since she lived farther downtown. She was in the backseat, because his wife had been in the front seat and there didn’t seem to be any reason for his mother to move up for such a short trip. He said something to her, she didn’t answer, he turned around: she sat frozen, it seemed, staring straight ahead past the front passenger seat. “Mom, you okay? What are you looking at so hard?” She continued staring, didn’t move. “Mom, anything wrong? you all right? why don’t you answer or look at me?” Nothing. He thought: Is she dead? Is this it, then? He reached over and touched her shoulder and neck. She seemed to be breathing normally but still stared straight ahead without moving. Should he pull over? he thought. Maybe she needs to be rushed to a hospital or for one of those EMS ambulances to rush to him. But he’s near her building and maybe she is asleep and something’s wrong with her eyes that’s keeping them open and she’ll snap out of it before he gets there. He kept looking back at her as he drove; she stayed the same; he parked at the hydrant by her building, put the emergency lights on, ran around the car and slid the side door open, and she suddenly stopped staring, turned to him and smiled, and said, “We’re home? So fast? I must have slept,” and he said, “But your eyes were open. You were staring out the windshield, or seemed to, the whole way after we dropped off Sally and the girls,” and she said, “I couldn’t have. Nobody sleeps with his eyes open, at least I never have.” He got her into the chair and wheeled her down the areaway steps and into the building—regrets that he didn’t tell Angela, or whichever woman was working that night—and also called her doctor the next day about it. He still doesn’t know why she froze up like that. Next time he sees his doctor or his wife’s—not the kids’; she’s strictly pediatrics—or meets one before then at a dinner or something, though the way he feels now he doesn’t know when that will ever be, he’ll mention it. He’d talk to her now if she were in the car. Last time they spoke she was hallucinating. It was the night before she went into a coma; next day—no, the day after that—she died. Ebonita called him; said his mother had been babbling for three hours straight, she’d never seen anything like it. About her children, husband, work, her family when she was a girl, a jump rope she played with for years; mostly, though, her mother and sister. “I can’t get her to stop. Maybe you can.” She put his mother on, and she said, “Party, party, party,” and he said, “Mom, it’s me, what do you mean ‘party’? What’s doing?” and she said, “Let’s go to a party. I want to party, party.” “Mom, it’s Gould; you’re saying you want to go to a party? What kind?” and she said, “How’s business?” and he said, “I’m not in business, Mom; I teach, I write,” and she said, “I’m going to bake a cake. First I should get out of here. I want to bake lots of cakes. I have to get up now and start baking if I’m to have the time to do it.” She was speaking away from the phone, maybe to Ebonita, and Ebonita said, “Talk into the phone, Mrs. B. It’s your son, so say something to him.” “Party, party, party,” she said into the phone. “I want to make and bake. Cookies, bread, cake.” “You always made great herb breads, Mom, do you remember? And what you called a zucchini bread, though it was more like a cake. Everyone loved it. Is that the kind of cake you mean you want to make?” “My sister’s coming today and she likes chicken the way I bake it and she loves my zucchini cake.” “Which sister? You come from a large family.” “We’ll party and party. Lizzie and Ethel, Harris and Rita. Zippie, though that wasn’t her real name.” “What was her real name? You and Aunt Zippie and Uncle Pete never wanted to reveal it.” “Party and more party. Are any of my family alive? I think they’re all gone and deceased, since I haven’t seen any of them in years. Could be they don’t want to come see me. Who would want to come see an ugly old mess. Is it fair that I’m the only one of my family left? What happened? Where’d my mother go? What’d I do?” And then more talking to herself, it seemed, where he couldn’t cut in, till he yelled out, “Ebonita, it’s all right, you can take the phone away, I want to speak to you.” About two months before that his mother said, “Tell
me, and I want you to be honest”—he was sitting on her bed, she in her chair, the newspaper she couldn’t read anymore because of her cataracts, but still had delivered every day, on her lap—“how old am I?” and he said, “Ninety-one.” “No, am I really that old? How’d I get to live that long? It doesn’t run in my family. And I drank and smoked and your father made life hell for me and I lost a child and never ate right because I always wanted to be thin and for the most part neglected myself in all the other things. I don’t get it.” He told Ebonita on the phone, his mother babbling in the background: “I’m coming tomorrow to see her. I’ll get the eight o’clock train and be there around eleven. She doesn’t sound well. But you say she has no fever and is eating and urinating okay?” and she said, “Everything but the talking’s normal. And she’s eating and drinking her food like she’s enjoying it.” His younger daughter woke him around four the next morning and said she couldn’t breathe. “You mean you’re having trouble breathing?” and she said, “No, I can’t get breaths. My throat’s stuck.” They later found out she had the croup. He gave her medicine that was for his older daughter’s asthma, called Ebonita around ten and said he had to take his daughter to the doctor now, and he’d either see his mother much later in the day than he’d planned or early tomorrow, all depending on how sick his daughter and mother are. “How is she?” and she said, “She babbled endlessly till two this morning and is now sleeping like a baby,” and he said, “She talk about anything different this time? Things or people or events you never heard her speak of before?” and she said, “No, it’s mostly her mother and sister and some her father and cake and bake and chicken and such. You a lot too, that you’re her only person she can really count on,” and he said, “That’s not true at all. There’s you and Lottie and Angela and some people from the street. Don’t take it personally. In fact, if you want, and you can say this idea came from me, tell her if she can count on me so much, how come I’m almost never there? But it must be very difficult for you, tending to her so many hours straight, and I’m sorry I’m not there to help out. Anyway, it sounds as if she’s much better already, but I’ll call you later to make sure.” He called later and his mother was still sleeping peacefully, though she had sat up for a few minutes to take some special canned food supplement through a straw. “Good, that means she got some food and you got to rest.” He dumps the stuff he had in the van, goes home, parks, then, while still in the car, he thinks, There’s a road near here he’s for a few years wanted to take to see what’s around it and where it goes, but he’s always given himself excuses not to: has no time, it’s a silly or childish impulse to carry out, and so on; but do it now, and he drives to it—it’s only a mile away and he passes it on the way to the dump and back and almost every weekday when he drives his older daughter to high school—and it winds through an area with homes and woods and hilly lawns like his own and ends up on a familiar road to the main town in this part of the county. He drives home on the familiar road, since it’s the shorter route of the two, parks, and walks into the house, and his wife says, “Was that you in the carport before?” and he says, “You mean about ten minutes ago in the van? Yes, but I suddenly forgot something,” and she says, “What?” and he says, “I don’t know, something. My mother call?” and she says, “What are you talking about?” and he says, “Just being dopey, that’s all, and possibly thinking, ‘Well, you never know.’ Anyway, the last few years she hardly ever called. I called her, though, almost every day and sometimes every day for a week. I tried to call more, every single day I was away from her, really I did.” “I know, my darling.” “It would’ve been nice if she had called—now, I’m talking; I’m not concerned, or ever felt slighted she didn’t call me much the last few years.” “Of course you weren’t.” “I’m sure she wanted to but didn’t think of it. Or she thought of it and then the thought quickly disappeared. She’d never stand on ceremony with me, either—that’s a term she liked to use. But you know, that, ‘He’s the son so he should call me,’ and it for sure wasn’t that she was too cheap to call. That was my father. ‘Penurious,’ I liked to call him—I mean if I had to put it in words—though some people, including my mother sometimes, called him cheap. Oh, the trouble he gave me as a kid when I wanted to phone a friend. ‘Your father got stock in Bell?’ and so on. But my mom? Just the opposite. ‘Call when you like, but better now than when your father’s around. You know how it upsets him,’ and of course an upset for him would start upsetting her. But do you think she took that tack to sort of get me on her side and a little against him, or just to establish what distinguished them? What am I trying to say here? Help me,” and she says, “She might have been showing you she approved of a number of things you did that your father disapproved of, and certainly that she didn’t think your calling your friends was a big deal.” “She was always supporting me and my work. Is that what you meant? Probably not. And I’m not referring to money, though she would’ve given me some to do what I wanted with it, within reason and her limited budget, and often offered: ‘Do you need any extra cash?’ Even now—I mean up until maybe two months ago—and I’d say, ‘No, Mom, I’m working, so I got enough coming in.’ But before I met you, to live off of while I did these so-called artistic or creative things, or for grad school or travel, but I never wanted to take it and hardly ever did. I wanted to be Mr. Independent, and I didn’t want to be taking money she might have, with a lot of difficulty, extracted from my dad. And, after he died, money that’d make her own life a bit more comfortable and secure. He was a good guy, though, and had a kind heart; I wasn’t alluding to anything about that. Everybody thought so, except sometimes my mother. A sense of humor too—both of them—I forget who I was originally talking about there. Though she, for some reason, became even funnier after he died—real witty lines and retorts which I never remember her saying before. Let’s see, what would be one? That crack about the Jack Daniels, when I tried diluting it because I thought it was too strong for her and she hadn’t had anything to eat yet. I think I told you it. Others. ‘If I get any older …’ Something about if she got any older than she was and Stone Age culture, but I forget. And both were affectionate to me most times, my father, earlier on, more than my mother—‘A kiss, before you go to bed every night you must give me a kiss’—and never raised a hand. Well, he raised it to me several times but it never struck. But she? Not a finger, except, and when I probably deserved it, to wag. I really loved them both, though if I had to make a choice—this, by the way, was the one impossible question to answer when I was a boy: ‘Who do you love more, your mom or dad?’—it’d be she. It’s true, I’d have to say it, I never said it before, but it was she. Not because I knew her twenty years longer. She was, all in all, just nicer and more dependable and predictable and with a more even disposition, and she made me feel better when I needed to and understood or tried to understand me more. But them both, you know? I’ve no regrets in what kind of parents I had in them both.” “I know. Try not to be so sad,” and he says, “I can’t help it. I feel miserable. This goddamn crying’s a pain in the ass sometimes, when it just spurts out in the worst public places and tears my throat, but I suppose it also has its good. I should’ve got a vaporizer for her room when she started breathing poorly again a few months ago. I didn’t want to take her money so she’d be more comfortable and secure in old age? So why, when I had the chance and the income, didn’t I give her everything she needed—gone into hock doing it, if I had to? Now I look back and think, What the hell was I saving the money for anyway? I’d only have been spending her money—wouldn’t I?—when you think I’ll probably end up with a small bundle from her when the estate’s settled. Laziness, that’s what it was. That I couldn’t pick up the phone and call the drugstore nearest her and say, Send over a vaporizer, send her everything she needs or the woman taking care of her says she needs.” “You did that. The women with her could have ordered anything they wanted, and no doubt did. And it was already costing you and your mother a b
ig bundle keeping those women there and feeding them.” “That I just couldn’t have picked up the phone every day and even twice a day, morning and night, and not mostly from my office, and spoken to her a few minutes? I had to keep it to once a day and most times not even to that? And laziness that I didn’t take the train in to see her more.” “You saw her a lot.” “Not enough. I was bored with the trip, I also found the car ride tedious, but I couldn’t have made the sacrifice more? What would it have taken? Bought some good stuff to read on the train. Or saved up, let’s say, since to me newspapers are much easier to read on trains than books, two or three days of the Times. Or the whole Sunday paper, no matter what day I left, or just the Arts and magazine and week-in-review sections—the book section I would have already read—or made myself tired by not getting much sleep the night before the trip so I’d sleep on the train most of the way.” “Now you’re carrying out these things you could have done too far, both for her and yourself, and it’s not good for you, it’s really not.” “I should have put her up in a nursing home around here—there are plenty that are good and cheerful, people have said. Closed her apartment first and driven her down, or temporarily closed it, in case she didn’t like the home, and seen her twice a day at this place, but she wouldn’t have gone in one.” “Then don’t raise it as a possibility. She was a New Yorker from birth, and even if she didn’t have any friends or close relatives there left, except for her niece—” “I should have gone in to see her the day before she died. That kills me the most: the last thing I could have done and I didn’t. But Josephine was very sick: I worried about the kid once she came into our room and said she couldn’t breathe. And I sort of made a secret decision with myself that day that I had to see to the sickly living before the dying dying. That’s an awful thought; cold, crude, awful, and something I didn’t even think then, so why’d I say it? Did I use Josephine as an excuse not to see my mother that day before? Again, laziness? No, I wanted to see her, absolutely, truly, and would have, and I thought my cousin was looking after her well or would, plus Ebonita or whoever was on”—“Ebonita was”—“but I—but my mother was ninety-one and I knew she was definitely failing, but I also wanted to make sure Josephine got to the doctor. But she would have seen me before she went into the coma. My mother. But I didn’t know she was going into a coma and seeing me wouldn’t have stopped her from going into one or dying, though it might have made her feel better for a few moments. I could have shown her pictures—longer than a few; minutes; hours. But pictures of the kids and you, photos I mean, recent ones she hadn’t seen, or just old ones of her and the kids and you where everyone looks happy and well. Photos of her parents and brother and sisters. I could have got them out of the breakfront drawers where she always kept them, kept them there when I was a kid. Of herself when she was a beauty. The same drawers. She still was a beauty, a beauty for someone her age and maybe ten years younger; she would have won a contest if there was such a contest for beauty at that age, but not on those final days. I wouldn’t have brought out the photos of my brother, no matter how cheerful and healthy-looking he appears in them and beautiful or handsome or whatever a boy is when he’s so young. And my father, of course, or maybe not ‘of course,’ since their marriage wasn’t that great. But photos of them together, just dating and in the latest styles; with friends, all of them arm-in-arm in a park once. One where she’s cuddling a dog, though when I was growing up she hated them, and where he has on these long sporty striped socks and what do you call those pants that end just below the knees?” “Knickers? Jodphurs?” “He was a rider too, in Prospect and Central parks: rental horses. And at their wedding reception. She looked gorgeous, holding what she said were a couple dozen long-stemmed roses my father got her, and he so handsome in cutaway and top hat. And one in a bathing suit; she, I’m speaking of—his legs were too thin for him to look good in them—holding an open parasol above her as if imitating a beauty contestant, and with a fashion model-of-today’s figure but showgirl’s legs. They’re all still there. I’m going to get them next time I’m in, and maybe they’ll be some of the few things of hers I’ll keep before I give or throw everything else away and close the apartment for good.” “She was very beautiful. It was the first thing my parents thought when you introduced them.” “Her skin. Did I tell you about it? Even on that last day, so smooth. Or maybe because of that day, more smooth than ever; I don’t know. Relaxed; going into death, if it’s not painful or distressing in any other way, might do that. But like someone’s—weeks before—thirty or forty years old. Or forty to fifty, better, but on that last day, thirty to forty.” “Even to have the skin of a sixty-or seventy-year-old would be remarkable for a woman her age.” “But it was much better than that. Amazingly, not many lines and none on her forehead and only a few around her chin and mouth and neck where they normally start congregating and growing when you hit fifty. Look at me. So let’s say I didn’t inherit her skin genes—for the face; her arms and hands were like someone’s her age—or my lines relate to other things. And with the plates in her mouth out too.” “I don’t follow you.” “That last day. If her dentures had been in, her face would have even been smoother, I think. But I did something that’s irreversible, I just know it. Usually the wrong things I do I can patch up, with talk or time or overcompensating later on, but these I can’t, especially that I didn’t come in that day. The previous one. The day before the last. When Josephine was so sick.” “Don’t blame yourself, darling. There wasn’t any one incontrovertibly right decision to make.” “I may even have made the right one, for all I know, but it still doesn’t help. Josephine was immediately put on antibiotics—right in the doctor’s office; they used starters. I remember running out into the hallway to get her one of those paper-cone cups of water. And I left early the next day to see her—my mother—and got there an hour and a half before she died.” “So one of the good things to look at is that you got there in time.” “Or at least before the moment we think she died. There was Ebonita and her daughter. I forget the girl’s name. What do I care that she had seen her grandmother die and so was used to it? She shouldn’t have been in the room with us. She should have gone into the kitchen during that time or taken a walk outside. But she didn’t know better, though she was old enough to, and I don’t think Ebonita did either, and there was nothing I was able to say. She was definitely breathing, though, when I got there, my mother. And for the hour and a half or so after. Hard breathing. Meaning it was hard for her to breathe—labored breaths and plenty of phlegm. And for a long time we went on and off thinking she was still breathing after that moment, but so softly we couldn’t hear it, and we also thought we saw her body moving a little. But the EMS guy who came hours later—we didn’t notify them sooner because we still thought she might be alive—said she’d been dead from about the time we’d originally said and that what we thought were signs of life was just the dead body beginning to break down and settle—I think those were his words—and the gases, or maybe that’s the same thing. I told you what he did, right?” “With his two fingers quickly on her neck and saying she’s gone?” “After, while we were waiting for the police, I said, ‘Can’t he, to make sure, use an instrument or something so we know she won’t be carted away alive?’ and he shrugged, as if saying, ‘All right, to make you happy,’ and monitored her heart with a stethoscope and pinpricked her skin and did something else with another gadget, and then said, ‘Nothing, I’m sorry, my condolences.’” “That part I hadn’t heard.” “I held her up, those moments I thought were her last. That’s not what I wanted. I mean I didn’t plan it that way—come in for it, have any idea it would happen, some dramatic moment like that—but that’s how it probably ended and the EMS guy was right. What do you think her babbling meant? She did it for almost half a day straight. I wish I’d been there to hear it.” “I know, you’ve said.” “It was like she was describing her entire life in that relatively short time, different from what you usually hear about it passing through the
dying person’s mind. I would have learned—but I told you all this—stuff about her family and my dad and her childhood that she only would have revealed in the unguarded state she was in. It even could have been embarrassing for me to listen to: things about herself and my father and maybe other men before—I doubt there were any after—though Ebonita said, in that hour and a half we had together before she died, there was nothing that made her or her daughter blush or anything she hadn’t already heard. Well, she probably had told Angela and Ebonita everything, including things about me that weren’t so good—I’m saying, in the years they had looked after her. If only Josephine hadn’t got sick, but what can you do.” “It was a freak coincidence. Of course, you were frightened for her, just as I was.” “You don’t think Josephine’s illness was in any way connected to knowing my mother might be dying? I mean, we were all at dinner when I got that first phone call, and I talked to Ebonita on your portable phone.” “I don’t see it. Listen, dearest, try for a while not to think of those last two days. Or think of them all you want; I’m not sure what’s right either.” “No, you were right the first time. I’m going to rest, I think. Try to nap, anyway.” “If you need me”—her arms out—“I’m here,” and he says, “Thanks,” and goes into their bedroom, makes sure the phone’s off, and lies on the bed. “Party, party, party,” she kept telling him over the phone. Or at least said it while she held the receiver and he was on the phone. Though maybe Ebonita was holding the receiver for her and his mother didn’t even know she was talking to him or even talking on a phone. No, she knew she was talking to him, or part of the time, since she asked, “How’s business?” something he thinks she said before in relation to his work, the teaching or writing or both. He’s sure she said it before, and more than once, and one time as a joke. But what did the “party, party” mean? And she sounded so chipper on the phone, better than she had for months. “My sister’s coming and she loves my chicken and I have to bake a cake” and “buy a new dress,” Ebonita told him she’d also said that day several times. Did she mean one of her dead sisters was coming to take her away? That she knew she was dying? That the party was some idea she had of joining up with her favorite dead people in heaven or some afterlife place—her beloved mother, whom Ebonita said she went on about most, and of course her firstborn son—or some notion she had of freedom and fun once she was released from the physical discomfort and misery she’d been in for years? That the cake was what she wanted to make for the party as an offering of sorts? Or just that when you go to a party you always bring something? which is what she thought. The new dress might have meant to her—or did Ebonita say a “fresh” dress?—but anyway, a shroud or just a nice outfit to look good in her coffin in or something presentable to wear to a party. If that’s the case, what’s the chicken mean? Nothing right now in his storehouse of symbols, but maybe there was one in hers. Or the chicken was a chicken, something she baked with a coating of corn flakes that her sister did like, and that made her sister coming to her more realistic. But if this is how she approached death, then she went fairly resignedly, right? Or not anxious or frightened and maybe even gladly, and that’s a good thought for him to have. But what else did she say? Oh, don’t start analyzing every word. “First I have to get out of here,” she told him, and she wants to bake “lots” of cakes. Well, the “out of here” is easy enough to explain, not that he’d be right, but “lots of cakes”? Maybe to give everyone she joins up with in this afterlife place. Anything else she say? He wrote most of it down soon after he spoke with her, a little of it even while he was on the phone, but doesn’t remember any more of it now or where he put those notes: probably in his top night-table drawer, but he doesn’t want to look: what’d be the purpose? Her arm thrashed a lot that last hour and a half and for a few hours before that, Ebonita said, and always the right. So, she was a righty, and what’s it mean anyway?—it’s all involuntary. His dad’s thrashed for two days when he was in his last coma, and maybe in the coma before that, and both arms, back and forth in front of his face and sometimes crossing but never hitting each other. When he tried to hold them down they’d push up, and his dad’s face showed pain or intense frustration at that moment, so he let them go, hoping his father wouldn’t hurt himself like breaking his nose. He called her doctor the day before he went to New York, and the doctor said that from everything Ebonita told him and the visiting nurse said about her, she’s failing. “I’m afraid she’ll never leave the hospital this time if we send her there.” “Alive, you mean,” and the doctor said, “To be absolutely frank about it, yes. The decision’s ultimately yours, though. But if I were you I’d get to her side quickly and try to make her as comfortable as you can at home. If you need to reach me for any reason, call day or night, though I don’t think you’ll have to except, perhaps, for a pep talk. I’m sorry, Gould. Your mother was a brave woman, but you have to remember we never thought she’d last this long, and from my conversations with her she didn’t think so either.” “Why, what’d she say?” and the doctor said, “I forget, but something, since she was always a pessimist regarding her longevity and health.” After that phone call he remembers thinking, What’s the guy talking about? She’s not dead yet. That whole last-nail-in-the-coffin business, which they also used on his father, is a bunch of hooey. His father pulled through three or four of them after the doctors gave him just a few days. He said to the doctor this time, “There is a problem, though. My younger daughter’s sick with a bad croup and my wife’s unable to drive her to a doctor or hospital if it suddenly becomes a real crisis, so I want to stay till early tomorrow to see how it turns out. You think I have time?” and the doctor said, “Never a guarantee. Your mother could be expiring this moment as we speak. You just have to hope she holds out that long. Keep me informed.” He wrote down most of what the doctor said, while he was talking to him, and what he remembered after when he was sitting by his mother the next day. All those notes, several pages of them, are stapled—not stapled; he doesn’t have a stapler. His kids do, one between them, but he didn’t use it. How come he can’t remember the simple name of such a common object, one he’s used thousands of times or at least a thousand, both as a word and an object? It binds pages, holds them together. It’s the first time he’s forgotten it—paper clip, he paper-clipped the pages and put them someplace, probably also in the top night-table drawer with that other thing he was thinking or talking of before and thinks he put in there, and which he also now forgets what it was. Something to do with his mother? He means, did this other thing have something to do with her? Photos? He doesn’t think so. More notes? It’s possible but doesn’t ring a bell. Since when does memory loss have anything to do with grief? Or the other way around: grief cause memory loss? Maybe he’s just tired. But he’s slept more the last few days than he has, in so short a time, in years. And he’s only sleeping this much to avoid remembering things about her. Should he reach over to the drawer—it’d take just a little turn—and get them out, the notes plus that other thing, if he put either of them there? No, he doesn’t think he’ll ever want to read those phone conversation notes. Why would he? So why’d he write them down then, when he was on the phone? It seemed important at the time, as if he were being given instructions on how to take care of her at the end. When he was with his mother: just to do something, he supposes, or more than that, but he forgets. He also doodled; he also tried reading; he also cleaned his nails with his thumbnails and bit off most of the torn cuticles; he also just stared at her for minutes, hoping her heavy breathing would suddenly ease up and that she’d open her eyes, blink, give some recognition that she knew where she was, turn her face or just move her eyes to him—he’d be saying softly, “Mom? Mom?”—and smile and maybe even say something: his name, how is he? where’s her dear friend Ebonita? she’s thirsty and would like something to eat, and so on. He also remembers thinking, What is she thinking? Is there anything going on in her head? Is it more like dreaming? Then what is she dreaming? Is she in any pain? Is
her heavy breathing and chest congestion affecting her thoughts? Is there anything he can do to make things better for her? A different position? Raise or lower the top of the hospital bed? Another pillow? One less pillow? Put a cushion under her feet? Should he be talking to her? Should he read to her from a book or even today’s paper so she just hears his voice? Would that bring her out of it? What would help her come out of what more and more seems like a coma? Is she shitting, peeing? She wears paper diapers, but do these have to be changed? He’ll know when she starts smelling. Water? Shouldn’t she have water or some sugar solution so she doesn’t starve? Is she really dying? Can this be it? Will she never recognize him again? Can he really be sitting here the last day or hours of her life and where she’ll never wake up? If she hears his voice—he was told when his father was comatose that the last sense to go is hearing—will that help her see him in whatever pictures are in her head? About those notes, does he think—he also thought a few times while he sat there looking at her: Maybe it’d be best if she went now without pain rather than have to go through this another time and then maybe another time before she dies—but does he think that, let’s say in a year or two or even six months, when he’s going through that top drawer for something else and comes upon the notes, if he put them there—or any place he put them—that he’ll read them or leave them in the drawer without reading them or just throw them away soon as he recognizes them? How can he know that now? But what does he think? He thinks, How can he know now what he’ll do? though he thinks he’ll more than likely throw them away unread. But things she said that he took down—in fact, isn’t that what that “other thing” is?—he’ll keep and read, keep forever, in the drawer or someplace safe, not just what she said on the phone the last time but all the things she’s said the past few years that he’s taken down, and regret if he couldn’t find them and regret more if he thought them lost. After about an hour and a half of sitting near his mother—he got up once to make coffee, another time to get it after it was made and wash the carafe and coffee machine cone—Ebonita, sitting a couple of feet farther away from her than he, pointed out phlegm dribbling over her lip and he thought, I suppose she wants me to wipe it, she obviously isn’t getting up—well, she spent a long night with her, didn’t get much sleep—and he got up and wiped his mother’s mouth and chin with his handkerchief. “Tissues,” Ebonita said. “We have a whole box of them and more boxes in the closet,” pointing to what was the broom closet when he was a kid but which now held all kinds of medical supplies and things, and he said, “Sorry; it’s also not sanitary, using this rag,” and stuck the handkerchief back into his pants pocket, but first, he remembers, folding the wet part up so it wouldn’t soak through to his thigh. Ebonita, he now remembers, had actually said, “Look at what’s coming out of her mouth; we should fix it.” Then more phlegm spilled out and Ebonita stood beside him and kept supplying tissues to wipe with, and he wiped her mouth and inside her lips and with wads of tissue dabbed her tongue and around it to absorb the constant rise of spit, dropping the tissues and the wads one by one into an old ice bucket that was being used as a trash container by the bed. “How come she doesn’t have a real trash can?” he said. “There used to be lots of them in the house. This one fills up so quickly,” and she shrugged and said, “Up till now this one did all right.” Then his mother started coughing while he was wiping her mouth, and he put his arms behind her and raised her up and held her there with one arm, thinking, This’ll help her cough up the mucus better and maybe even help her breathing and where she won’t choke on all that stuff, and it’ll also be easier to get the phlegm out of her mouth. Then, as long as he had her up and she had stopped coughing and bringing up phlegm, he thought about giving her water. “Don’t you think she should have some water? How long has it been?” and Ebonita said, “Hours. I tried to before but none got in. And she hasn’t evacuated for a long time neither, which isn’t good. But it isn’t easy getting liquids down her; she coughs it all up.” “We should have an eyedropper to give it. Even drop by drop would do some good. You don’t have one around, do you? I thought of bringing one—I sort of knew she’d need it—and found some old one at home but left it.” Regrets: he did think of it but never looked for one. His wife had said, “If she’s unconscious or too weak to drink anything, how do you get medicine and fluids into her? Probably she should be in a hospital and on IV,” and he said, “Believe me, they’ll only make matters worse for her there, forcing things down, sticking a million needles in. Maybe I should bring an eyedropper—I know we have one here—or go out now for one of those dropperlike spoon things we used for the kids when they wouldn’t swallow their medicine,” and she said, “We never had to give it that way,” and he said, “Then I’ve seen them displayed in the pharmacy here,” but that’s as far as it went. He could have driven that night to a local Giant that has a pharmacy and big drug department or bought one in a drugstore when he walked to her building from the subway or gone into the drugstore at Penn Station, but forgot. He didn’t forget; he thought of it when he got out of the subway and passed a drugstore but then thought, Just get to her building, you could miss seeing her alive by minutes, and started to jog. When the train was pulling in to New York he thought of calling her from Penn Station, but after he got off he ran through the terminal to the subway station with a token in his hand and ran up the stairs to the platform, not wanting to waste a minute calling, but had to wait several minutes for the uptown train. He looked for a phone on the platform but the only one operating was taken and continued to be taken till the train came. Then the person hung up and got in the same car with him. He set his mother down and said to Ebonita, “Can you get me … no, I’ll get it; watch her,” and got a tablespoon and cup of water from the kitchen, raised her in his arms again, and while Ebonita held the cup he got a spoonful from it and stuck it in his mother’s mouth. It seemed to go down. “Good, Mom, good,” though she didn’t open her eyes or make any response or motion that she knew anything was going on around her or happening to her. He got another spoonful of water and was ready to stick it in her mouth when the other water, or some of it, dribbled out. “Mom, if you’re hearing me,” he said, wiping her chin and neck, “you have to take some water; you need it.” “Maybe you gave her too much, though I didn’t see her neck swallowing any of it. Try half,” and he spooned half a tablespoon of water into her mouth and looked and it seemed to go down. “It’s gone. Did you see her neck moving this time?” and Ebonita said, “I think so, but I can’t say for sure.” Then some white liquid rose from her throat, and he said, “Oh, my God, what the hell’s that?” till her mouth was almost full of it and it was about to spill out, and Ebonita threw her hands to her face and said, “Oh, no, this is the end, I’m sure of it. Delilah”—to her daughter, sitting there looking at his mother—“cover your eyes,” and he said, “What are you talking about? Get me a towel; lay it down here,” while he held his mother up with one arm and stuck a bunch of tissues into her mouth to soak up the liquid and when the towel was down he held her face over it and all the liquid seemed to come out. He held her there a few seconds more and then got her in a sitting position to wipe her face and see if any more liquid was there, and some seemed to be coming up, white again, and he held her face over the towel and said, “Get it all out, Mom, this is good for you; all the junk in your lungs is coming up,” and when no more of it came out he held her in a sitting position and wiped her face and patted her cheeks and head with damp tissues and thought of getting a damp rag to lay across her forehead when she started choking and her eyes were open and he said, “Mom?” and she looked blankly ahead while her body started shaking and she was still choking, and he said, “Mom, what is it? Can you hear me? What can I do for you?” and her eyes never moved and she was still shaking and choking but nothing was coming up, and he yelled, “Mommy, oh, no, Mommy, oh, Mommy!” and held her to him with both arms and put his mouth to her forehead and said, “It’s all right, Mommy, it’s all right, I’
m here, Gould’s here, I’m here with you, Mommy, I won’t leave you, oh, no, Mommy, my Mommy, oh, Mommy, oh, please don’t go, Mommy, please, please don’t go,” and Ebonita said, “She’s stopped, she’s quiet, I knew it, close her eyes, close her eyes!” and he held her head up and shut her eyes and let her head down softly till it hung over his shoulder, and he kept her that way for around a minute, his eyes closed and head against her neck, hugging her, and then laid her on her back and put his ear to her chest and mouth and chest again and then rested his head on her chest and started to cry. The cat jumps onto the bed, walks around him on both sides, and then steps up on his chest and lies on it facing him, and he says, “Please get off, you weigh a ton, I can’t breathe with you on me,” and the cat stays and he picks it up and drops it on the floor. It jumps right back up and lies on his chest the same way, and he says, “Listen, I told you, I know you mean well and want to help me, but you’re just too big a load,” and raises his arm to lift it off him again. The cat sits up, resettles itself on his chest till it faces his feet, and stretches out more so there’s much less weight in one place than before, and he says, “Okay, all right,” and rests his hand on its back; “you don’t feel so heavy now, stay.”