Golden Country

by Jennifer Gilmore

For all her hatred, she had certainly kept a good deal of Seymour saved in that small space. Upon unhooking the writing table, David found his father’s embroidered linen handkerchiefs scented with cigar smoke and balled from use, his matchboxes, stacks of Playbills, a pair of shattered spectacles. David contemplated calling Seymour over to show him, but what would it lead to? Whatever it was, David was not up for it right now.

  Stacks of letters filled the built-in cubbies, several piles sticking out and tied with fading ribbons. Was he finally gaining access? David could not resist. He slid one out of a pile:

  June 1931

  Sarah,

  Just suffer through it. It is our lot, dear, to be both over and underused at the exact same time. If you must, then why not get a little tight in the daytime and do a bit of dancing? The way I see it, life passes us by in either case.

  Let’s go to the Plaza,

  Celia

  David pulled another out from the stack:

  April 1932

  Dear Maggie:

  I remember dressing up in my mother’s clothes in that musky attic, and now here I am a grown woman. When I get all gussied up some days—especially when I wear my new summer silk dress with the blue sash, I feel like I’ve become my mother, am looking out from her perspective: Did the world seem as small to her as it does to me?

  “What are you doing?” Sarah stood behind David as he began to read a letter from his father.

  “Nothing,” he said, throwing down the page and turning in the chair toward his mother. “Just getting you ready to go, Mom.” David tried to regain his composure. Who was the girl in this letter, and how had she turned into the woman who stood behind him, whom he was helping to send away?

  She grabbed the chair from behind and tried to shake it. “Stop looking at me!” Sarah screamed. The chair, heavy with David’s weight, didn’t budge. “Stop it right now!” she said.

  David turned and hooked his arm over the back of the chair. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he said, rising from the desk. Did she remember these letters? He imagined his mother at this desk on all those nights he came in to kiss her good night before Mary read to him and put him to sleep. Did she return to her letter and mention her only son? “Dear Celia,” David imagined she wrote to her old friend, “Adorable David has just come in to kiss me good night, and this makes me so happy.”

  Of course David knew this was not the case. Now, looking at Sarah, her eyes spilling with outraged tears, he thought that though she could not always remember that a mirror was a mirror, perhaps her memory reached further back. Would that be to his childhood or to hers? He tried to think of his mother as a young girl but could remember only the pictures he had seen of her, a head of blond curls on a sad, stoic face.

  David lifted the writing table, still strewn with letters, and clicked it shut. “Okay?” he said.

  Sarah ran her hands over her salmon-colored blouse, and the fleshiness of the color mixed with the cold shininess of the fabric struck David as morbidly depressing.

  She nodded her head succinctly. “That’s better,” she said and headed back to the television in the den.

  The director had quit, the lead and her understudy were fighting, and the set was falling apart on David’s rehearsals for Greenwillow, and so Seymour and Dulcy brought Sarah to the Longevity Center in Connecticut without David. He was not particularly upset by this. The prospect of “committing” her, which was how he had taken to referring to it, was overwhelming. He imagined his mother would fight the whole way, kicking and screaming, arms gripping the side of the car, refusing to get out, and David couldn’t bear to watch.

  So when David and Miriam finally went to visit her after her first few weeks, they were expecting to find Sarah in an even worse state than before.

  “I’m sure she’s an absolute wreck,” he said, turning off the Merritt. Seymour and Dulcy both had reported that everything had gone “smoothly,” but David hadn’t believed them.

  Miriam looked out the window. Perhaps it would be nicer to live up here, she thought. In the country. Though the landscape did not resemble it, she remembered Costa Rica, the feel of the earth beneath her feet as she walked through the forest with Enrique. Now Miriam imagined waking to birds singing in an effort to avoid thinking of the afternoon that lay ahead of her. She had dreaded this day since she’d found out the week before that David wished her to accompany him on this visit. Somehow she’d always imagined he would like to go alone, and now Miriam knew she would be called upon to muster sympathy. For both of them, she thought, and yet, as David parked the car and dramatically knocked his head on the wheel, she didn’t have the sympathy she knew a good wife should have for her husband and her mother-in-law.

  For whom she lacked it, David or Sarah, she couldn’t tell. Ever since the wedding, she had barely tolerated her mother-in-law. And since this last Thanksgiving, she hadn’t been too fond of her husband either. For six months she had harbored this resentment. Everything she did was informed by the fact that, yes, she had picked the dill and the rosemary, but David had been the one actually to poison them. And she felt the way he had done so with Essoil was some sort of psychological meanness: When it came down to it, no matter whether they had eaten it that day or on another day, David had wanted to hurt her father. It had devastated Joseph that what he had spent his whole adult life working toward had ended up practically killing everyone close to him. He had not seen a bit of the humor in it. Esther, by contrast, could see it vividly. After she had vomited so much that bile came up, bright and shiny as neon, she and Miriam had lain on the bed together, completely spent. They had lain there looking up at the ceiling, which, Miriam was chagrined to note, needed painting, and Esther had started to laugh. Joseph had wandered upstairs deliriously and been furious at the sight of his wife rolling around on the bed with Miriam, laughing so hard tears streamed down her face.

  “Killed by dill!” she had screamed.

  “I fail to see zhe humor in this, Esther.”

  “Oh, Joe,” Esther had said, sitting up and wiping her eyes. “We’re all fine. We lived. Lighten up, sweetie.”

  He’d headed back downstairs.

  They were all changed by that sad afternoon, Miriam thought, as she looked at the ranch-style institution her mother-in-law now lived in. And David had not so much as apologized. He’d only moped about the house and garden, more irritated that he would no longer be able to practice his science on the precious produce than contrite for what his produce had done to them. From the bedroom Miriam had watched him fingering his stupid string beans, streetlights clicking on, mothers from the neighborhood calling their children home for dinner, and she had wanted to jump from her window and stomp on the whole garden. She imagined autumn squashes bursting, the buds of late fall flowers snapping from their delicate stems.

  And yet she missed David’s gardening, the way he would come upstairs smelling of earth and growing things. She hadn’t even minded him dirtying her Egyptian cotton sheets with the loose soil. After Thanksgiving, their lovemaking had lessened and grown more mechanical. But on the nights Miriam managed to release her anger from her body—this happened most often after she had come home from one of David and Seymour’s shows and had lived in a parallel world for only a few hours—the primitive quality of their sex returned. But now it was best when they reached for each other in the middle of the night. Awakened by a reversing truck or the house settling, the two would turn to each other without any of the trappings of the dailiness that had come between them. In these moments they were themselves and also more than themselves, and they made love in the sad and lovely way saved for two people who have seen the failings of each other and have stayed together despite them.

  “Well, come on, David,” Miriam said now, as she watched her husband grip the steering wheel. She knew she should reach out and touch him in some way, and knowing this made it even harder to do so. “Let’s just get this whole thing over with,” she said, opening her door, her feet hitting the pavement hard
.

  “Sarah Bloom,” David requested at the first nurses’ station of the Longevity Center. He tried not to take in the long, shining hallways and the occasional screams that echoed through them. How could this have happened? Were his mother to become aware of anything, David thought, she would absolutely die to see herself living this way. He saw now that his mother’s life had not been what she imagined. But why not? Because it could have been. There were dances and balls and opening nights. There was the symphony and two children who adored her. There was Madison Avenue. What else could his mother have wanted?

  Sarah seemed to appear out of nowhere, waltzing out of her room with an enormous smile plastered on her made-up face.

  “Mom,” David said, surprised. His mother had never worn much makeup, and now she had big streaks of rouge on each cheek, dark lined eyes, and purple eye shadow up to her eyebrows.

  She embraced them both warmly.

  David stepped back. At first he thought she had an open wound across her forehead, as if his mother had had a lobotomy that he had not been told about, but then he saw the headband stitched with red sequins. She wore a straight-cut gunnysack with spaghetti straps, fringed at the hem.

  “Welcome,” Sarah said, curtsying. “How wonderful to see you both,” she said. She pulled them toward the common room.

  There another woman, also dressed for flappier days, joined them. The two beamed at each other.

  “Where have you been?” Sarah asked.

  “Movement,” the woman said. “I thought you were coming. And who are these?”

  “How rude of me! Hazel, this is…” Sarah turned to look at David. A vacant look passed over her face, and she tilted her head as if to search for his identity.

  “Your son,” David said.

  “And your daughter-in-law,” said Miriam, nudging David.

  “My son!” Sarah beamed.

  “Lovely to make your acquaintance!” Hazel reached out and vigorously shook David’s and then Miriam’s hand.

  Hazel took Sarah’s hand and, tugging her near, kissed her on the cheek. Her red lips moved into a smile as they got close to Sarah’s face.

  “Shall we walk?” Sarah said, blushing.

  “Why not?” David said. “Would you like to show me your room?” he asked her.

  Sarah shrugged. “I suppose,” she said.

  “Perhaps we could talk alone, Ma,” he said, looking toward Hazel and then Miriam. “Miriam will keep Hazel company awhile.”

  Miriam glared at David. “Of course,” she said to Hazel. Why, she thought to herself, had she come here? To babysit?

  “I could show you where we’ll be putting on our play!” said Hazel.

  “That would be lovely.” Miriam smiled genuinely toward her mother-in-law’s new friend.

  “A play?” David asked them both.

  “We’re doing Gigi!” said Sarah. “I’m to play the lead, of course,” she said. “The night they invented champagne,” Sarah began to sing, bobbing her head back and forth in rhythm.

  “Sarah is a fabulous actress.” Hazel looked toward her friend with admiration. “We’re very lucky to have her here in time for our production.”

  “You are,” Sarah said. “Quite lucky.”

  “Gigi is a young girl,” David said. “She’s eighteen years old, tops.” He couldn’t help but think of the irony of the lovely charm song between the older couple, “I Remember It Well.”

  Sarah and Hazel looked questioningly at David. “I’m fabulous in it,” Sarah said. “Just terrific.”

  “She is,” piped in her friend. She put her chin on Sarah’s shoulder. “Truly.”

  Sarah smiled and patted her head. “Do you remember college, Hazey? My Lord!”

  “I don’t think I went to college,” Hazel said.

  Sarah whipped her head around, bumping Hazel from her shoulder. “Why, you most certainly went to college. You went to Smith! Don’t you remember Smith?”

  Hazel turned this thought over for a moment. “Fine.” She shrugged. “Smith.”

  “That’s right!” Sarah said. “Of all things, Hazel!” she said.

  “So let’s go see your room then.” David began to walk away from them.

  “It’s this way,” Sarah said. “Follow me.”

  Sarah’s room was a cross between a college dorm room and a hospital room. David could see out onto the parking lot, his little yellow Renault Dauphine shining in the sunlight. Then he turned to look at the pictures pasted on the wall above his mother’s bed. He leaned in closer: magazine photos of movie stars combined with advertisements. Marilyn Monroe’s unmistakable body attached to the head of a monkey. Elizabeth Taylor’s face atop the body of a wingless bird.

  David stepped back. He had been told not to question her, because this could be frustrating for both of them, so he resisted the urge to ask his mother exactly what all this was about. He sat down on the twin hospital bed that was cranked so the head rose above the feet section. He patted the space next to him.

  “Sit down, Mom,” he said. His heart beat wildly.

  Sarah sat down and smiled at her son. Her teeth were stained with bits of bright red lipstick, and when he looked down to turn away from the obscenity of his mother’s mouth, he saw the sequins on her dress, some bent, casting tiny frowning shadows. Many of the beads had come loose, and several of the ones that remained were cracked or chipped. The fabric beneath, David noticed, was fading to yellow. Sarah used to walk down the stairs in her flawless gowns, the diaphanous fabric rising and falling as she took each step. Little black clouds, David had thought as he had watched the hem of his mother’s dress.

  “Mom,” he said now. He knew what he was about to do was questionable, but he also knew there was no alternative. He would honor what his mother had asked him all those years ago.

  “Yes, dear.” She looked around the room. “Do you like my new place?” Sarah scratched at the skin beneath her headband.

  David looked up to see what he knew was Rita Hayworth’s body—he would recognize that anywhere—attached to an ad for toothpaste. Beneath this, he noticed, was a torn advertisement for Essoil. “The future” was all that he could make out, and, from the place where the woman would be holding the bottle, her arm and hand were torn loose, leaving only the very tips of her fingers.

  “It’s very nice,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Sarah said as she happily settled back on the bed.

  “Let’s talk,” David said.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Are you happy, Mom?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  David shook his head. “Really?”

  Sarah shrugged.

  “Because you know you’re not going to get better,” he said.

  Sarah blinked at her son and smoothed down her dress. The sequins snapped and ruffled beneath her touch.

  “This is it. You’re only going to get worse,” he said. “You’re going to stop remembering everything.” He held up the plastic glass of water on the nightstand. His hand shook. “What is this?” he asked her, his voice trembling.

  “A cup,” his mother said. Her eyes darted from side to side with fear, and then she nodded her head, relieved. “It’s a blue cup, dear.” She nodded definitively.

  “Yes, it is, Mother. But one day, maybe tomorrow, maybe next year, you won’t know it. You will be stuck here forever,” David told his mother. Some people, the doctor had said, are incurable. Some people! When had his mother become some people? David knew he was beginning to get hysterical. “You will never come home,” he said.

  Sarah looked down at her lap. “I like it here,” she said quietly. Her quietness nearly cut David Bloom in half. In his youth it had been her cruelty that had wounded him, but now he imagined his body sliced up and hung on the wall by his mother’s sad voice.

  Sarah rocked back and forth on the bed, her arms crossed.

  What, he wondered now, was she thinking? Was it of him? Because right now, all he could remember was the way he
had once adored her. “There’s no business like show business…” David and his mother had once sung Irving Berlin together. “Like no business I know.” For some reason they had been singing outside the brownstone when it had started to rain. The two of them had hopped over the puddles beginning to form in the cracked slopes of the sidewalk: “Nowhere could you get that happy feeling, when you are stealing that extra bow…” Sarah had stared out at the river, the lights of Queens shining in the distance. Thank you, she had screamed across the river, curtsying. She blew kisses into the night, and David took a bow.

  This was unbearable. His mother was far too young to have this happen to her. He was far too young, for Christ’s sake. Sarah had robbed him of a safe and happy childhood, and now, when he had finally escaped her, she was robbing him again of a secure adulthood. Of the prospect of a happy future with happy children of his own.

  Would there be happy children? When he had run into Miriam on the street in Manhattan, an image of her walking behind a child, holding the outstretched hands by the thumbs, had socked him in the stomach.

  “Look, Mom,” he said. He searched her eyes and grabbed her wrist. “What I’m saying is, I can help you.” He paused.

  “Wonderful,” she said.

  “No, help you,” he said again, tugging her wrist. He knew this was the right thing, what his mother, or the woman his mother had once been, would want him to do. “I can get you pills, Mom. If you want to make this all go away.”

  “This?” she asked him, pointing to the cup that David had placed back on the nightstand.

  “No, this.” He brought out his arm to show the room. “The sickness.” Inadvertently, David pointed at his mother’s heart.

  “Why on earth would I want to do that?” she asked.

  David looked at her.

  “I’m to be Gigi.” A hand fluttered up to her neck.

  “Gigi,” David said.

  “I was thinking, you know”—she leaned conspiratorially in to her son—“we could do the show together.”

  “Really?” David said, straightening. “You’d like that?”