Black & White

by Dani Shapiro

  “Do you know something?” He speaks softly.

  They haven’t had five minutes alone since they got here.

  “What?”

  “I’m proud of you.”

  She pulls back, looks at him.

  “Don’t be.” The room is suddenly blurry. “I fucked up completely.”

  “No. You didn’t. You’re fixing it. Our being here—it’s going to be okay.”

  “You don’t know that, Jon.” Tears are falling freely now. She swipes at them. It’s too early in the day. If she starts crying now, where will she go from here?

  “I didn’t say it was going to be easy,” he says. “But it will be okay.”

  Nothing is as it’s supposed to be. And Clara—Clara’s just trying to get through it. Her entire focus is on Sammy. This has been the right thing—obviously, painfully, the right thing. But what had she thought? That they’d come down for a day, maybe two, have Sam meet her grandmother, and then—mission accomplished—they’d flee back to their lives and leave Ruth here to die? Is that what she thought? Clara shakes her head hard, angry at herself for her willful naïveté.

  She walks into the kitchen and begins sorting Ruth’s daily pills into the long plastic pill box labeled for each day of the week. The small powder-white Ativan. The pale blue ovals of Oxycontin. The morphine—a cheery canary yellow. The counter is lined with prescription bottles sent up from the pharmacy downstairs. When Clara was a kid, the Apthorp Pharmacy was an old-fashioned place that sold items like blood pressure cuffs and plastic hair bonnets; it smelled vaguely of alcohol and camphor. Now, its shelves are stocked with fancy French creams, salt scrubs from the Dead Sea. Even the cotton balls are an esoteric brand. But they do still dispense medicine, and it seems Clara is in there at least once a day, handing the pharmacist a triplicate prescription. Ativan, Oxycontin, morphine. Keep filling these, the hospice nurse had said. Even if you haven’t run out, keep filling them. Was she saying what Clara thinks she was saying, a subtle suggestion that they stockpile the medicine? In case there came a time—

  The baby monitor on the coffee table crackles.

  “Hello?” Ruth’s weak, hoarse voice. “Anybody there? Somebody—I need somebody!”

  “Coming,” Clara calls.

  She walks down the hall. Pauses for a moment by Ruth’s bedroom door. Over and over again, dozens of times a day, she has to pull herself together, all the fragmented bits. Consciously, with effort. She cannot be unprepared, not for a single second.

  She pushes the door open. What does Ruth need? A bedpan? More morphine? The hospice nurse suggested catheterizing her, but Ruth has resisted. The room is dark, the shades drawn. Ruth’s eyes have become sensitive, everything about her fragile, disintegrating—she doesn’t want to see or be seen. Her life, reduced to shades of gray, soft shadows.

  She’s sitting on the edge of the bed, a blanket wrapped around her.

  “What are you—” Clara begins.

  “Please, don’t say anything,” Ruth says. “I can’t do this by myself.”

  “What are you trying to do? Here, let me. Will you just—”

  Clara approaches—her unformed plan to take her mother under each arm and swivel her back into bed—but Ruth pushes her away with surprising force.

  “Don’t tell me what to do!”

  “I’m just trying to keep you safe,” Clara says.

  “I’m not a child, Clara.”

  Clara stops. Looks down at her mother. The papery skin, the purplish-black shadows under her eyes, the tufted head. Not for the first time since they have been here, she thinks about the book. CLARA. Even her own name, stolen from her by Ruth. Ruth—poring over the images with the ever-helpful Peony, deciding on order, size, commentary—did she think about Clara? The real Clara, not the one on the page? Did she think about what she was doing to her daughter, even for an instant? Clara feels nothing but a sick coldness: icy, dispassionate. Just die, she thinks. Just die, already. And then hates herself for it.

  “Hand me my walker.”

  There’s no way Ruth is strong enough to use her walker, but Clara does as she asks. What’s the worst that can happen? A broken pelvis? A shattered femur? It’s all going to be in the ground soon enough. It’s all just going to disintegrate into powder and dust—isn’t it? Ruth has not expressed her wishes. Big funeral or small. Burial or cremation. For all Clara knows, Ruth wants to be preserved cryogenically—frozen so she can come back as herself in her next life.

  “Here you go.” Clara places the walker in front of Ruth, then stands aside and watches as Ruth struggles to her feet. The cords in Ruth’s neck strain from the effort. Her arms quiver. One leg pretty much no longer works at all, and her upper body has wasted away. But she does it. Somehow, she pulls herself up. Wheezing, eyes flashing. She is nothing if not determined.

  “Okay,” she says, once she has caught her breath. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To look at art,” says Ruth, her face shining—glowing beneath her papery skin like a child’s. She reaches into the pocket of her robe and pulls out a handwritten list: Sonnabend, Robert Miller, Barbara Gladstone, Feigen Contemporary, Gagosian… The writing is quavery, almost unreadable. Clara can make out the names of eight or nine galleries. “You, me, and Samantha. I want to show her where she comes from.”

  Where she comes from? Clara fights back hard against the venom. She comes from a small island in Maine. She comes from my belly. She comes from her wonderful father. She comes from—

  “I’ve hired a car,” Ruth is saying.

  “This is impossible. You can’t be serious.”

  “We’re doing this, Clara.” Ruth is panting just from the attempt to stand still. “It’s not up for discussion. Now help me get dressed.”

  Up until now, Clara has successfully avoided anything tactile, anything…intimate… as it relates to her mother. Ruth is looking at her expectantly, like a toilet-trained toddler waiting for a wipe. This is another test, Clara thinks. Another way for Ruth to push and push until finally Clara snaps. That’s what Ruth wants, isn’t it? She wants to see what will happen if the façade Clara works so hard to maintain is blown—truly blown to bits. What does Ruth think she’ll discover in the rubble? Rage? She knows all about Clara’s rage. Disappointment? Loneliness? Sorrow? Is it possible she thinks—or hopes against all hope—that perhaps all that will be left is love?

  “I think I’ll wear a caftan,” Ruth says. She starts to try to move to the bedroom closet, then stops. “We can just pull it over my head. That would be easiest.”

  I can’t do this.

  “Could you pick one out for me, sweetheart?”

  As if sleepwalking down a flight of stairs—insensibly descending—Clara enters Ruth’s walk-in closet. The scent hits her in a single breath: camphor, mothballs, sweet old sachets layered between shawls and scarves. She inhales all the longing of her childhood. Those hundreds of hours spent hiding inside Ruth’s closet—sifting through her blue jeans, the piles of indistinguishable black tops, the few elegant dresses wrapped in plastic garment bags—as if on a secret mission to find her mother’s true spirit.

  Now there are dozens of caftans. A rainbow of unreasonably bright hues. When did Ruth ever start wearing color? Bright pink, beaded coral, lime green, iridescent turquoise. Crinkled silk, soft cotton—it seems important, somehow, to choose the right one. What possible difference can it make? Still, Clara can’t decide. She stands there, transfixed.

  “The pink one,” Ruth says, after a minute or two.

  “Which pink one? There are a few different—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, hurry up!”

  Clara looks at Ruth, bent over her walker. Maybe she’ll exhaust herself, standing there. Maybe she’ll realize this whole outing is an insane idea. Clara is stalling, she now realizes, as she pulls a pale silk caftan, the color of a ballet slipper, from its hanger. Where did Ruth find such a thing? It looks as though it might have come from a Turki
sh souk, an open-air bazaar. More likely, it was purchased at one of those stores Clara has passed on Madison—windows displaying artfully ripped jeans and embroidered tops inspired by Woodstock.

  She doesn’t want to undress her mother.

  Ruth unties her bathrobe with one hand.

  “Help me, Clara.”

  Clara summons a memory: dressing Sammy for all those years before Sam started to dress herself. The soft downy body. The unblemished skin, the pure ripple of her ribs. The sweet smell—how Clara used to sniff Sam whenever she hugged her close! She tries to keep those images and that smell in mind as she tugs Ruth’s robe off, laying it in a crumpled heap on the bed. Then the nightshirt—an ancient man’s dress shirt, actually, torn at the elbows. Is it possible that it’s one of Nathan’s? Blue-and-white stripes, an attorney’s uniform, faded now, all the starch gone out of it after so many washings.

  She closes her eyes, but she can’t keep them closed. Like a child who knows she’s not supposed to look at the sun, she blinks open—and, like the sun, what she sees imprints itself upon her. Damaging her. Her mother’s body: the crescent-shaped scar running up the side of her chest, where one lung was removed. The flaky yellow pallor of skin that has been buried under sheets and blankets for months. The bump—a tumor?—rising knoblike from the right hip bone. And superimposed on all that: Ruth Dunne, young and beautiful and easy in her nakedness. Stepping out of the shower, dashing to answer the phone—so flawless, so lovely. Is this what we come to—all of us? Even the ones who seem untouchable?

  “My bra and panties,” Ruth says. “Top drawer, on the right.”

  Clara does as asked, now. Her movements quicker, robotic. Let’s get this over with. At the other end of the apartment, she hears Sammy’s high-pitched giggle. Awake, now. Don’t come in here, don’t come in. Clara slides the panties up, one stick-thin leg at a time. Puts on the bra—one strap, then the other, reaching around Ruth’s back to hook it in a gesture that could almost look like a hug. Then the caftan, which floats easily over her head.

  “Now what shall I wear, a hat or a scarf?” Ruth muses. “Or perhaps baldness is in order?”

  This is important to her—how she presents herself to the world on this of all days.

  “With the caftan, a scarf, I think,” says Clara. Suddenly a fashion stylist.

  “Very well—that white one.” Ruth points to a simple white silk scarf hanging from the closet doorknob.

  The Apthorp was not designed to be handicap-accessible. Not for the first time, Clara maneuvers Ruth’s wheelchair out of the elevator, down the two steep stone steps to the courtyard. The three generations of Dunne women—Ruth, Clara, Sam trailing behind them—make their way over the cobblestones and out onto Broadway.

  “Good to see you, Ms. Dunne!” The doorman tries to contain his reaction; Ruth’s deterioration is obvious. “Out and about, are you?”

  “Is that our car, Joseph?” Ruth asks.

  A dark blue town car is waiting at the curb.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Sammy, help me get Grandma inside,” Clara says.

  “Allow me, ma’am.”

  Clara steps back and allows Joseph to help her mother into the back of the town car. Sammy scrambles in next to Ruth. Clara concentrates on the apparatus itself, releasing the levers from the back of the wheelchair, folding it flat. The thing must weigh forty pounds, and the size of it is awkward; she staggers, trying to hoist it into the car’s trunk.

  Joseph comes around the back of the car. “Let me give you a hand.” He lifts the wheelchair easily. There are dozens of elderly people living in the Apthorp; he’s gotten this down to a science.

  He slams the trunk closed, then turns to Clara.

  “Poor Ms. Dunne,” he says. “How much time does she have?”

  Clara stares at him, amazed—though she shouldn’t be. When it comes to birth and death, people seem to feel they can ask anything. The normal rules of civil discourse do not apply. When she was pregnant with Sam, perfect strangers used to reach out and pat her belly. When’s the baby due? Is it a boy or a girl? Are you having natural childbirth or using an epidural? Now—with death—it is much the same. What’s wrong with her? It’s cancer, right? The big C. What do the doctors say?

  “Not much,” Clara says faintly. “She doesn’t have much time.”

  Joseph shakes his head. “Such a shame,” he says. “My own mother went fast—it was in her liver.”

  “Sorry to hear it.” Clara tries to look through the tinted back window of the town car. She can see only shadows, the vaguest outline of two heads.

  “Ms. Dunne’s a great lady,” he says.

  He goes around to the other side of the car and holds the door open for Clara; she slides in so that Ruth is in the middle. How many hundreds of trips have they taken together, in the backs of taxis and cars like this one? In the close confines of the backseat, she feels panicky. But she’s not allowed to panic—not, at least, in any way that Sammy can pick up on. Clara should have brought Jonathan. Somehow it had seemed simpler to do this without him. Easier, not to subject him to Ruth’s complete and utter condescension. It doesn’t surprise me that Clara married an artist, she had said to Jonathan just last night. Or rather—should I say artisan?

  “Here, let me help you buckle up,” Clara says. She leans over Ruth, who is slumped down and tilted slightly to the right, as if she might just topple over.

  “I don’t need a seat belt,” says Ruth. She lets out a small wheezing laugh. “Really, if there were ever anyone who didn’t need to worry about a seat belt—”

  “It’s the law, Grandma,” says Sammy. Clara tries to fasten her own seat belt, then abandons the effort. The twisted shoulder strap, the buckle wedged deep in the crease of the seat—everything, even this, feels impossible.

  Ruth has a point, she really does. A yellow light, a speeding car, a high-impact collision—that would be the best way for her to die, wouldn’t it? Given the current alternative? Ruth would never know what hit her. Except—here is where the thought goes astray—Clara and Sam would be with her. Clara finds her hand on the door latch. Ready to bolt at the next red light and pull Sammy out with her.

  “Go down Ninth!” Ruth calls to the driver. They’re already passing Lincoln Center, just before the road splits. “Ninth Avenue!”

  Clara can barely stand it. Something about being out in the open with Ruth, speeding down the wide open expanse of the avenue—the Afghan restaurants, the low seedy buildings, the concrete barricades in front of the Port Authority—she feels brittle. Breakable. She sneaks a glance at Sammy. How is she doing? She’s staring out the window, taking in every single thing. No conflicted emotions there. Nothing but excitement. And Ruth: her elegant profile, emaciated, the white scarf appearing like a turban. The dangling earrings—Moroccan gold—that Ruth requested just as they were leaving the apartment. As the car crosses 34th Street and heads down into Chelsea, Clara pulls out her cell phone and punches Robin on the speed dial.

  “Robin Dunne.” The crisp, efficient voice, answering her own phone for a change.

  “Hey there,” Clara says. Ruth is watching her. Who does Ruth think she’s calling?

  “Where are you? I called the house, and there was no answer—”

  “We’re on our way to Chelsea.” Clara pauses. “Mom wants to go gallery-hopping.”

  “You’re kidding.” A long beat on the other end. “Clara, please tell me you’re kidding.”

  “Um—no.”

  “Let me talk to her.” Ruth holds out a hand for the phone.

  Clara leans back into the soft, comfortable leather seat. At least there’s this. At least there’s plushness and privilege, tinted windows and climate control. She can hear the tinny sound of Robin lecturing Ruth over the cell phone.

  “Stop it.” Ruth holds the phone away from her ear. “Robin, I don’t have to listen to this.” She looks at the key pad, squinting. “How do I hang up this thing?”

  “Give me that
!” Clara grabs the phone away. “Hello? Robin?”

  “This is insanity,” Robin says. “She’s going to kill herself.”

  Suicide by gallery-hopping. Clara hears beeping in the background, phones ringing. An entire switchboard lit up, waiting for her sister.

  “Robin, could you please—”

  “Oh, I’ve got to take that,” Robin says hurriedly. “Sorry.”

  The line goes dead. Breathe, Clara tells herself. Just keep breathing.

  “There’s a show at Robert Miller I want to see,” Ruth says. “Twenty-four artists—‘The Subjective Figure’—and the fuckers didn’t ask me.”

  “Mom! Watch your language!”

  “Oh, really, darling. When you were a child, you heard far worse.”

  “Are you sure you want to see the show, then?” Clara asks. The last thing she needs is an angry Ruth.

  “Diane, Jean-Michel, Lucien, Alex Katz, Mapplethorpe.” Ruth continues as if Clara hadn’t spoken. “It’s absurd.” Her hand is wrapped around the door handle, knuckles white.

  Sammy is watching them, eyes darting back and forth. How much is she understanding? What can she possibly make of any of this? In Southwest Harbor, grandparents are old people who live in Florida. Tennis-playing, golf-cart-driving leathery creatures smiling from ceramic picture frames.

  The car turns right onto 24th Street, a block completely unfamiliar to Clara. What is this neighborhood? She has no recollection of ever being here before. The Chelsea of her childhood was a place to drive through on the way downtown, a blur of crumbling brown-stones and gay bars. Now, all the galleries she remembers from SoHo—fifteen, twenty years earlier—are here: the polished glass expanses of Mary Boone, Matthew Marks, Metro Pictures, one right after the other. As if the whole art world just simply up and moved.

  “What happened to SoHo?” Clara asks Ruth. “Are there still galleries—”

  “God, no.” Ruth is fiddling with her head scarf. “SoHo’s full of bankers. The artists drove up real estate values. The place is a mall now.”