The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  Here, on campus, everyone looked heartlessly young.

  “What did Ted say about your coming down?” Allison said.

  “I haven’t talked to him about it yet.”

  “What did you do, leave him a note?”

  “It’s what you do when you simply don’t have it in you to explain anymore. It seems like explaining is all we ever do these days.”

  “Oh, no,” Allison said.

  “Don’t jump to any conclusions,” said Carol.

  Ellen was waiting for them on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. She looked heavier, and Carol remembered that she had been having trouble with her diabetes. They hugged and cried a little, and Allison stood by. She would not be emotional now. She took Ellen’s hand when Ellen offered it but did not move into the embrace. Allison taught school and was dating someone Ellen often teased about—a nervous, tentative man whose devotion to her seemed somehow forlorn, as though he were already certain she would leave him. In two years he hadn’t worked up the courage to ask if they might live together, and Allison had decided to let him take his time. Things were comfortable. She was in control. Indeed, she had always seemed more confident than the others; it had been Allison whose decisions always appeared to come out of some deep well of self-assurance, and Carol had often supposed that it was a matter of strength, some gene of determination that had been passed down from Edith. One didn’t think in terms of happiness, looking at Allison; one saw glimmers of emotion in her face: anger or disappointment or dismay or determination, or gladness; but there was always something else, too—something indefinably and profoundly still. A repose. In some obscure way, one always failed to attend to her laugh, and it was difficult to imagine that she ever allowed herself to falter or stumble into the areas of doubt that plagued her sisters.

  “Come on,” Ellen said, opening the door. “I’ve already got our table.” They followed her through the dimness to a booth in a back corner. Menus large and unwieldy as posters had been set out in three places, and Carol, sitting across from the other two, thought of plates in rows on cafeteria tables, the food one gets in institutions. She saw Ellen looking at her. Poor Ellen, with her four children and her husband off in the western mountains, living with someone else, a client he’d met in his work as an architect. Horsewoman, the sisters called her.

  But there was something in Ellen that invited abuse, and often enough Allison would pick on her—the province of the older sister, perhaps. Allison seemed to know what targets to hit, and when she was angry enough she never hesitated. The two older sisters had been feuding off and on ever since Carol could remember, and sometimes they went for weeks without speaking to each other. Usually it was Edith who brought them back—or bullied them into an alliance against her.

  Carol thought about the fact that today they were in a different kind of alliance.

  Before she sat down, Allison lit a cigarette and then went looking for an ashtray at another table. When she returned, she offered the others a cigarette.

  “No,” Ellen said, plainly annoyed. “How can you think of smoking with that cough you’ve had all fall?” Carol saw Allison decide not to respond, and they made themselves comfortable, as if this were an ordinary occasion. They didn’t speak about Edith at first. The waiter came, and they ordered lunch, and then Ellen told a story about her three-year-old waiting for her rice to get cold and then trying to count it, grain by grain, when she couldn’t get much past ten. When she asked Carol how the drive south had been, Carol talked a little about Highway 29, which seemed a foot or so narrower than all the other dual-lane roads in Virginia.

  “Okay,” Allison said suddenly. “I think we all know that we should put Mom in some kind of hospice or something.”

  “Hospice,” Carol said. “Isn’t that for the dying?”

  “Oh, come on. What do you think is happening, anyway? Don’t you know what the end of this is?”

  They looked around the dim room at the other patrons, the pictures on the walls. The restaurant was relatively new, and predictably its clientele was mostly college students. The music coming from the walls was some vague, unpleasant hybrid of rock ‘n’ roll and disco. It was not loud enough to be more than faintly distracting, and even so Carol decided that she didn’t like the place, with its splashy colors on the walls and its air of being campy and outrageous, as if the world existed purely for entertainment. The waiters were dressed like someone’s idea of Hollywood in 1930. They wore pencil-thin mustaches and had their hair slicked down, and the lapels of their jackets were absurdly wide. She looked out the window and saw a man walking a little boy along the sidewalk. The little boy stopped to pick up a handful of red leaves and held them out to the man, and there was something in the open, uncomprehending, delighted expression on his small face that sent a shiver of grief through her.

  She remembered her mother’s old, morbid talk of dying, the casual way she’d always managed to bring it up—her insistence that no ceremony accompany her into eternity, since she couldn’t stand the thought of people praying over her. The best thing was to be put away and out of sight, the sooner the better. And there were to be no measures to prolong her life, either, no medicines or treatments or discussions of treatments. Nothing could be worse than to be the subject of whispered conferences in hospital hallways—all those weighty deliberations over the dying, as it had been during her husband’s last illness. “Just let me go when the time comes,” she’d said many times. “No frills and no prayers. Just leave me my dignity.”

  Well, it was not going to be that simple now. And Edith was not going to have her dignity.

  “God,” Carol said, feeling as if for the first time what it meant to suffer the gradual disappearance of her mother. Perhaps in tiny, almost imperceptible increments the effacement had been going on for a long time, but the thought of it now in its steady, terrible progress was no less shocking: Edith, with her throaty laugh and her temper; her love of swing music, old musicals, painting and sculpture; her stubborn attention to her children, her profound interest in their lives as if there were improvements to be made, still work to do as a parent—that woman was already gone. “Do you remember,” Carol said, “how Mom always hated the idea of people deliberating over her?”

  “I know what you’re going to say,” Allison told her. “And you can spare yourself the energy.”

  “I was just going to say here we are, deliberating.”

  “I know what we’re doing,” Allison said, blowing smoke.

  Carol said, “I wasn’t trying to cause trouble.”

  “Nobody has to cause it, honey. It’s here.”

  Ellen said, “Mom doesn’t know we’re deliberating, Carol. She’s getting so she doesn’t know anything at all.”

  “Oh, please,” Carol said, “I don’t think I’m up to this.” “We have to be,” said Allison.

  The waiter came and set their food down. Carol had ordered a hamburger, and the smell of it made her want to cover her mouth. She pushed the plate a little to the side and turned to look out the window again.

  “Incidentally,” Ellen said in a trembling voice, “I’m missing a bracelet.”

  Carol frowned at her. “This is not the time.”

  “I can’t find a comb and brush set I was saving to give a friend of mine at school,” Allison said.

  “Stop it, both of you. I didn’t drive all the way here for this sort of talk.”

  “All right, look,” Allison said. “I called a couple of places. We can go tour them today.”

  And Carol said, “What if I take her back with me?” The sound of her own voice was a surprise to her. The others stared.

  “We’re past that sort of discussion,” Allison said.

  “Maybe I don’t want us to be past it.”

  “Oh,” Ellen said. “Don’t start.”

  “I’m not starting anything. I just asked a question.”

  “It’s the wrong question.”

  “Yes, but why? Why couldn’t I take he
r? Couldn’t we all go in together and hire a nurse? There’s room.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Ellen said.

  “I am,” said Carol. “I am serious.” She felt extremely good all of a sudden, as if something had opened out inside her. She put her hands down on the table and watched her sisters look at each other.

  “Well,” Allison said. “I just think that’s crazy. She barely knows us anymore. Soon she isn’t going to know us at all. I mean, she’s going to need round-the-clock care, and her insurance will pay for professionals to do it. Qualified people.”

  “But what if I decide to take her?” Carol said.

  “What about Ted? Could you get Ted to agree to a thing like that?”

  “I don’t want to talk about him,” she told them and was startled by the abrupt stir of anxiety which blew through her at the sound of his name. What if he were to read her note and simply move out? She thought of the apartment empty, his things gone from the closet, and she had to fight an urge to go call him, to leave this table and this discussion of another life, a life not her own, which had been so darkly threatened only a year ago. What if Ted had arranged to meet someone else at the library or the bar—someone closer to his own age, someone who shared his rage at the world’s failure to acknowledge him or conform to his vision of it? Her sisters were talking, and she breathed, tried to listen. For some time she had been feeling uneasy, waiting for something to change, idly entertaining the idea that perhaps it would happen soon: perhaps he would leave; perhaps she would find herself on her own again. She had courted such thoughts, like daydreams about madness, and there had been a kind of thrill in it, because it provided a contrast; it was a way of looking upon how far she had come from trouble. And yet here was the deep shiver in her blood when she pictured him reading the note. When it occurred to her that he might actually leave. She remembered how it had been the last time—the sinking into darkness, the days of a kind of dank sleep, of a horrible quiet, and suddenly she knew she wouldn’t be able to stand living alone. She had an image of herself in the rooms of the apartment with Edith, who would need her for utterly everything.

  “… and I’m in debt up to my eyeballs now,” Allison was saying, “I haven’t received a support payment in eight months. I can’t afford it anymore. I just can’t. And the insurance will pay if she’s hospitalized. I mean, we’ve already been through this.”

  “You all have,” Carol said, fighting back tears. In her distress it seemed to her that they had always kept her on the outside, and now they were going to turn away from Edith.

  Both of them were protesting that they had kept Carol informed, and Allison put her hand on her arm. “We can’t start recriminating with each other,” she said.

  Ellen said, “I feel like I should go home and start looking for things that don’t belong to me,” and put a napkin to her face.

  “We can’t sit around crying about it,” Allison said. “It won’t go away just because we wish it would.”

  Carol looked out the window again. The sun was everywhere, and everyone looked happy. Without wanting to, she began thinking through what she would say to Ted. It was important to be extremely careful. She would say that it was something she’d had to do, had to resolve, putting Edith in the hospital. She would tell him the call was sudden. There hadn’t been time to do more than write the note. She wanted to call him now, and yet she sat very still, barely holding on, feeling the panic rise.

  Her sisters were talking about how at one time or another each of them had felt as though Edith were shutting the others out to concentrate on her alone. It had been almost like a competition. “Well,” Allison said “maybe it’s because I’m the oldest, but even when she was being impossible and I was mad at her I liked being with her.”

  “I used to like talking to her about you guys,” Ellen said.

  “Me, too.”

  “God, don’t use the past tense about her,” Carol said, too loudly. The panic had worked its way inside her bones, it seemed. Her own hands looked too white to her.

  “I know we seem hard,” Allison said. “But I’m thinking of our mother, too. I know what she’d want. And she doesn’t want to be seen wandering the streets like a bag lady.”

  “You know what happened this summer?” Carol said, feeling vaguely petulant. “She called me Dee, and she told me she thought she’d failed with us.”

  “Are you all right?” Ellen said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Well, I guess she did fail with us,” said Allison.

  The others waited for her to go on, and when she didn’t, Ellen said, “I’ve got four of them I’m failing with.”

  “At least you have children,” said Allison. “Would you like two of mine?”

  Allison shrugged this off. “All right,” she said. “We can go on record and say that it was all my idea. But I’m for choosing a place today.”

  “Not a hospice, though,” Carol said.

  “Carol,” said Allison, suddenly. “Do you really think you could do it—you know, take over?”

  They both looked at her. “Oh,” she said, the dampness moving under her skin. “I—no. It’s—you’re right about it. It’s impossible.”

  “All right, listen,” Ellen said. “We have to do this together. We have to agree on it, and we have to find a place, and look at it and everything together. That’s the only way.” She bit into her sandwich and sat there chewing, looking almost satisfied, as though everything were accomplished. But then her expression changed. “It sounds like we’re planning a murder, doesn’t it?”

  They were both looking at Carol. “Listen,” she said. “I know I suggested it. But I can’t take her. It’s impossible, okay?”

  “Calm down. No one expects you to do anything of the kind.”

  She found that she couldn’t look at them. She stirred the coffee she hadn’t drunk and tried not to think of Edith among strangers.

  “When Mom arrived here this time,” said Allison, “she gave me a blouse. I think it was the one I bought for you, Carol. Two Christmases ago. It was all wrapped up, and she’d sprayed something on it, some fragrance or other that I didn’t recognize. But it was the same blouse.” Her voice broke.

  “I have a cake mold that belongs to somebody,” Ellen said.

  Carol excused herself and went to the ladies’ room. She had to ask the hostess where it was—down a flight of stairs, past a row of closed utility doors and a wall telephone. The rest room itself was small, windowless, with a single mirror over the sink. The light was bad, and the flower design in the wallpaper had faded to the same brown shade. She stood in that closetlike space and was quiet, and then she cried into her hands. It all came over her like a fit, and she’d been wrong about everything. How badly she feared that her life might change. In her own eyes now she was what she was: someone clinging to small comfort, wary of the slightest tremor. She washed her face, fixed her mascara. It was a matter of facing up to realities. Certainly it was a matter of practical truth. Yet she felt trapped. As she left the rest room, she saw her own image in the wall mirror across the corridor, and it was like Edith’s. Something in the smudges on the glass had given her face a darker, older look. Climbing the stairs, she thought of her mother spiriting objects from one house to another, and something occurred to her that seemed suddenly so right it stopped her: what if, all those years the sisters had looked with tolerance and with humor upon Edith’s pilferage—talking of it as an attempt to force some sort of equal share of everything—what if it had been instead a kind of web her mother had meant to spin around and between them as a way to bind them together, even as she slipped away.

  How awful to be so alone!

  She reached the top of the stairs, shivering. Her sisters were waiting for her in the dim little corner beyond, and as she approached them she had a bad moment, like heartbreak, of seeing herself elsewhere, going through things her mother had wanted her to have from their houses; in her mind it was decades from now, a place far
away, past the fear of madness and the dread of empty rooms—and she was an old woman, a thin, reedy presence with nervous hands rummaging in a box of belongings, unable quite to tell what was actually hers and what wasn’t, what had been given and what received, with what words and by whom, and when.

  LETTER TO THE LADY OF THE HOUSE

  It’s exactly twenty minutes to midnight, on this the eve of my seventieth birthday, and I’ve decided to address you, for a change, in writing—odd as that might seem. I’m perfectly aware of how many years we’ve been together, even if I haven’t been very good about remembering to commemorate certain dates, certain days of the year. I’m also perfectly aware of how you’re going to take the fact that I’m doing this at all, so late at night, with everybody due to arrive tomorrow, and the house still unready. I haven’t spent almost five decades with you without learning a few things about you that I can predict and describe with some accuracy, though I admit that, as you put it, lately we’ve been more like strangers than husband and wife. Well, so if we are like strangers, perhaps there are some things I can tell you that you won’t have already figured out about the way I feel.

  Tonight, we had another one of those long, silent evenings after an argument (remember?) over pepper. We had been bickering all day, really, but at dinner I put pepper on my potatoes and you said that about how I shouldn’t have pepper because it always upsets my stomach. I bothered to remark that I used to eat chili peppers for breakfast and if I wanted to put plain old ordinary black pepper on my potatoes, as I had been doing for more than sixty years, that was my privilege. Writing this now, it sounds far more testy than I meant it, but that isn’t really the point.

  In any case, you chose to overlook my tone. You simply said, “John, you were up all night the last time you had pepper with your dinner.”

  I said, “I was up all night because I ate green peppers. Not black pepper, but green peppers.”