“I’m glad to see you,” she said in a thin little girl’s voice, but her eyes were clear and focused.
I sat down next to her in one of her plastic chairs. “Me too,” I said.
“We’re all having good fun in the dining room. Would you ladies like to join us?” Bonnie inquired cheerfully.
My mom got up. Maybe she was afraid to be alone with me. I couldn’t blame her after our last visit. We made our way down the hallway, and I noticed that she still walked at a good clip. A woman who looked much older than my mother sat in a hard chair humming Mozart and kneading her forearms.
“That’s Mrs. Noonan. She used to teach piano over at the conservatory,” my mom told me.
The tables in the dining area were filled with groups of people, some talking, some coloring, some hooking rugs. My mother sat down at an empty table and began making a chain out of orange and brown construction paper. I sat beside her and spoke to her in the tone I used with my students.
“Look at the pattern you’ve created!” I picked up her chain. “Orange, orange, brown, orange—”
She cut me off. “Barbara, I’m not an imbecile.” Her eyes sparkled as brightly as a Door County lake. “Well, sometimes I’m an imbecile.”
We both laughed at the preposterousness of the situation.
“Some days are better than others,” she said.
I picked up a sheet of construction paper and ran my fingers over it, soothed by the familiar texture. “I’m sorry I upset you during our last visit.”
“You and I go way back, don’t we?” she said. She put her shriveled hand on mine.
“I’ve been so mad at you.”
She sank into her chair and started playing with the button on her sweater. “I’ve noticed.”
“I brought you a pumpkin pie.”
“You remembered,” she said with irony.
Part of the reason I loved celebrating Thanksgiving was that it was such a non-event when I was growing up. I had no living grandparents, and my parents focused most of their social efforts on entertaining the Schines’ Shabbos guests. My mother would overcook a kosher turkey, and we’d eat it for days, but for dessert she’d serve a homemade pumpkin pie, and the two of us would polish off half of it in one sitting and have the rest for breakfast the next day.
“The boys didn’t much like pie, did they, darling?” she said.
“No, Neil and Dad would eat strawberries topped with non-dairy, pareve Cool Whip instead.” I wrinkled my nose.
“Of course, pareve,” she repeated.
“Nondairy because we’d eaten meat,” I said.
“That’s right, pareve.” She looked pleased with herself.
“Did you have big Thanksgiving dinners when you were little?” I asked, hoping to prompt a memory that might open a door to her childhood in the mansion.
“No. Just Norman, Daddy, and me.” She still looked lucid, but she was struggling for words, as if she were trying to tell me something before the veil lowered over her brain. “And Andy and his dad.”
I grabbed my purse and pulled out the photo. “Did Andy know you when you were a child? Is that why you had this?”
My mother took the photo and smiled. “That’s Norman,” she said in her little-girl voice. I was losing her, but I tried to stick to my childhood instinct to sit tight and let her retreat, knowing she’d come back to me.
“Norman’s so busy now. That’s why he hasn’t come to see me.” She smiled proudly. “He’s writing a big paper on the Spanish-American War.”
“Do you miss him?” I asked, aching for her.
“Oh no, dear. We’re going to go for a splash tonight after he gets done with his paper. Big paper. He’s writing about the Spanish-American War.”
I wanted to crawl into her broken brain and hold up the veil with my bare hands. I wanted to know everything. “What about Andy?”
She looked at me, her eyes clouding, the veil dropping, dropping.
“Let’s have some pie,” I offered. “I’ll go get a knife.”
Her face slackened as if someone had flipped a switch. The mechanics of opening the pastry box and removing the pie baffled her, so I glided my finger along the flap and lifted it, releasing a burst of cinnamon and cloves. I set the pie in front of her and handed her a fork. My refined mother gobbled up most of the custard in four bites, orange goo smearing her mouth. She pointed to the crust, giggled, and scooped out a little more pumpkin filling with her finger. Then she shoved her finger in her mouth, licking it clean like one of the beaters she’d doled out to Neil and me when she was baking our birthday cakes.
“Oh, we can salvage this,” Bonnie announced as she walked over to us. She reached into her pocket and retrieved a packet of wipes. She blotted the damp square against my mother’s chin and upper lip, which was sprouting two coarse gray hairs. She cleaned the creases around her mouth as she stared up at me, her eyes not quite vacant, her sticky hands clutching my knee as if we were sitting together at the Downer Theater watching the scariest movie of our lives.
23
I’d never missed my mother as profoundly as I did after I visited her at Lakeline. I hungered to learn every detail she’d buried about herself. Then I could go back to the Shabbos goy and ask him who he had been to her. And he’d tell me. He’d wanted me to open my heart to her, and I could. I’d go see her again. I’d catch her on a better day. She’d have more lucid moments, and I’d wait for them. I wasn’t giving up. Now it was time for me to dispose of my letters to Tzippy. I’d held on to this documentation of my resentments long enough.
I went home and headed straight downstairs to the basement. I hesitated for a second before I opened the cedar chest and retrieved my mother’s hatbox from under a mountain of linens. As I was refolding the linens, a joint fell to the floor. My brain slowly absorbed the information in front of me. I knew Lili and her friends had tried pot. Kara’s mother had called me in a snit after she picked the girls up from Summerfest last July and she’d smelled it in their hair. She headed up the D.A.R.E. program at the high school and had a good deal invested in the issue of drugs. Dawn and I had assured her that they were good kids, and they were all contrite when we confronted them.
I put the joint in my pocket. The idea of Lili smoking pot in our house felt like a violation of the nest I’d worked so hard to create, particularly if she’d been smoking with that horrid Taylor. Then a more alarming thought entered my consciousness, shoving aside my Taylor worries. What if Lili had read my letters? I should never have kept them.
I took the letters upstairs and pulled out Sam’s paper shredder. I dropped in the first letter, mesmerized as it devoured my words and spit them out in shards. When I’d shredded the last letter, I went back downstairs and looked into the bottom of the hatbox, hoping against hope that I’d find a few strands of my mother’s hair, colored the way she liked it. I fished the joint out of my pocket and brought it to my nose, sniffing in the sweet smoky scent. I considered taking a big hit.
On my way to pick Lili up from school, I called Dawn and told her about the joint. She was jammed up at work and asked me to call back later.
“So you’re not worried?”
“Not about the joint,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“God, this is awkward, Barbara.”
“Just tell me.”
“Megan says that Lili hasn’t been herself.”
My mind raced directly to the hospital bed where they would hook Lili’s brain to electrodes. “What do you mean? That she’s depressed?”
“Don’t let your imagination run away with you. Listen, honey, I can call you in thirty.”
“Please call me.”
Lili was waiting for me outside school. She was standing with Taylor and Amanda, another new friend I didn’t like. Lili was spending her babysitting money at the mall, buying skinny jeans and blousy shirts that rolled off her shoulder. She was no longer wearing the boot, but her gait hadn’t returned to normal yet. I rolle
d down the window as my blood warmed. The thought of her reading my letters, my diary, shamed me. So much for my new calm.
“How about if Daddy grills some steaks for supper?” I asked as she shut the car door. I was trying to figure out how to talk to her about the pot.
She shrugged. “Sure.”
“We need to stop at Sendik’s then.”
“Okay with me.”
“How’d your math test go?”
“C-plus.” It was an improvement.
“That’s good. Maybe the medicine is working?” We never called it by its name. I hadn’t noticed much of a change in her in terms of her focus, and she was growing more distant every day.
“Yeah, I lost the bottle, though. Can we get some more?” There was no apology in her voice.
“Lili, you have to be careful with that stuff.”
“What, like do you think some kid is going to steal it and sell it on the black market?” She cackled.
“That sounds a little extreme, but it is an attractive drug to people.” I told her I’d call the pharmacy.
I failed three times at parallel parking the car because I was so distracted by my drug worries and those letters. What if Lili asked me about them? How would I ever begin to explain everything about my mother? I was just beginning to grasp the story I would someday share with her.
Mindy Hecht spotted us pulling into the parking lot at Sendik’s. When I got out of the car, she hugged me so hard that my earring got caught in her tennis visor. “I can’t wait to tell Ian who I ran into!”
I didn’t get paid much as a preschool teacher, but I did enjoy my rock-star status. “I can still see Ian sloshing around the playground in those alligator rain boots.”
“He’s reading Harry Potter.” She lowered her voice, as if protecting the ears of a parent of a less precocious reader who might be passing by.
“Harry Potter? So young?” I asked with sincere awe. Making Mindy feel proud of her son restored my sense of equilibrium. “I’m not surprised.”
Mindy smiled at Lili across the roof of the car. “She’s gorgeous,” she told me.
I said to Lili, a little belatedly, “You remember Mrs. Hecht, don’t you?”
“I think I met you here once. Nice to see you again,” Lili answered respectfully.
“I had a third child just to be a part of your mom’s classroom again. She’s the guru!” Mindy glanced at her watch. “Oops, gotta run.”
We were pushing our cart down the cereal aisle when Lili said, “Mrs. Hecht is like stalker into you.”
“Lili, she’s not a stalker.”
“Is she your friend, then?” Lili tossed a box of Pepperidge Farm Lido cookies into the basket.
“We’re friendly.” I ignored the bag of potato chips she grabbed.
Lili limped along through the produce section and put a four-dollar box of raspberries in the cart.
“Would you please ask first?” I snapped. “These are out of season.” I put them back.
“Well, like what does friendly mean? Do you like have lunch or go shoe shopping?”
“Why are you asking me this?”
“I’m just trying to figure out who your friends are.”
“You don’t think I have any friends?” And then I flashed on Dawn and her high school buddies yukking it up at Oktoberfest. “I do. Your aunt Jenny, Sheri Jacobstein, and the 4th of July gang—”
“Your sister-in-law and Mrs. Jacobstein, who’s, no offense, way more into you than you are into her, don’t count. Neither do your teacher friends and Dad’s business friends,” she said officiously.
“They are my friends, Lili, and then there’s Mira.”
“Who’s Mira?”
“An old high school friend. We see each other for lunch sometimes.” The last time I had lunch with Mira was when Lili went off to kindergarten and my afternoons freed up. We’d lost touch after high school and run into each other when she was looking for a preschool for her daughter. She’d become a prominent divorce attorney, and I met her downtown at a restaurant where all of the men and women were wearing power suits and talking on their cell phones. I tried too hard to sell Mira on the new and improved version of myself, and the whole lunch was an uncomfortable affair that I wanted to end quickly.
“Mrs. Hecht seems nice. Maybe you could have lunch with her.”
“Why are you so worried about my friendships?” I asked, aware that I had just been scrutinizing hers.
“Everyone should have a best friend,” she said with conviction.
I had a best friend once, I wanted to tell Lili. I wanted to drive her to the mansion and take her on a tour of every spot where Tzippy and I had played when we were growing up. Another wave of loss lapped against me.
She picked up a bunch of bananas. “These in season?”
I looked at her, amazed at how she’d gone from bratty to compassionate to impish in the span of the last ten minutes. “Yes, smarty-pants.”
Back in the car, I took a deep breath and said, “I found your marijuana in the basement.”
“I’m sorry,” Lili said after a fraught silence. She looked just as she had when she was seven and I made her return a handful of sugar cubes to Benji’s Delicatessen. She held out her little hand, coated in white granules, and apologized to Benji remorsefully.
“Were you getting high in our house?” I asked, remembering how smug I felt when I assured Dot that this was just a phase.
“Just once with a couple of kids from Summerfest, swear. When you and Dad went up to Elkhart Lake.” Lili had sold lemonade at Summerfest and met some college kids.
“You mean you weren’t doing it with Taylor?”
“You hate her, don’t you?”
“That’s not the point, Lili. I’m concerned that we can’t trust you and your friends home alone anymore.” I shuddered thinking about the four girls in her class who only a few months ago died in a solo collision.
“It was ages ago, Mom. I hid the pot in the freezer, and I was going to throw it out, but I forgot.”
The freezer? “But I found a joint in the cedar chest.”
“This guy Ned must have stuck it in there,” she said quickly, gulping down her words as she did when she was nervous. “I didn’t.”
She sounded convincing, but I was afraid to read her face. I needed to believe that she’d in fact hidden the marijuana in the freezer and had never opened my chest or found my letters to Tzippy.
“Is there anything else you need to tell me?”
“No.” Lili looked down at her lap. “Swear.”
Sam would not be grilling steaks for us that evening; I’d failed both to buy them at Sendik’s and to remember that he had a client dinner. I’d also been so tied up with Lili that I hadn’t picked up Dawn’s return call. I dialed her number three times, but my calls went through to voicemail. I microwaved a few burgers for Lili and me, and she was sweetly contrite as she slathered on mustard, volunteering all sorts of newsy tidbits about her day. After dinner, she went upstairs and did her exercises.
When Sam called me on the way home from his dinner, I told him about the pot. He was willing to accept Lili’s explanation and move on. He walked through the door with a big smile, changed into jeans, and made one of his enormous bowls of freshly popped popcorn—no microwave bags for him. The three of us sank into the soft brown cushions of our sofa and let the buttery kernels comfort us. I couldn’t have told you what was on or how we managed to polish off the entire bowl. But for that moment, with Lili’s body curved into mine and Sam’s arms around us, I felt like a bird who had returned from a dangerous migration. For tonight, life was sweet, maybe Splenda-sweet, but I’d take it.
A few days later, we made our annual Thanksgiving trek to Deerfield. Traffic was predictably heavy, and the drive took us two and a half hours. Lili slept most of the trip; she’d gone over to Megan’s the night before and hadn’t come home until midnight. For the last couple of days, she’d been doing her exercises diligently, and soon she’
d be running again. Sam and I were elated that she was already falling back into step with her old friends and her old self. She’d decide that Taylor was bad news, if she hadn’t already.
Lili only woke up during our ritual pit stop. Sam bought her a package of watermelon Bubblicious, as was our tradition, and for me a can of diet soda, my road trip indulgence. He didn’t buy anything for himself. Sam rarely ate between meals, one of the many good habits Rose had instilled in him.
I caught a glimpse of Lili in the rearview mirror, blowing a big pink bubble. She looked about ten years old.
“Did you have fun at Megan’s last night?” I asked.
Her bubble popped. “Total blast. Mrs. Travinski took us to Kopp’s when she got home from work.”
Dawn was fun like that, the kind of spontaneous mom who would pile a gaggle of teenagers into the car and take them for custard in the dead of winter. “What was the special flavor?”
“Cranberry Medley.” Lili wrinkled her nose. “Gross. I got chocolate,” she said, and blew an enormous bubble.
“They usually have pumpkin this time of year,” I said as the bubble popped. We all laughed as she peeled sticky pink gum off her eyebrows.
Rose and Artie met us in the driveway and gave us a warm hello. Rose held out her hands and squinted at me. “You look svelte.” It was the highest form of compliment from Rose Blumfield. I had lost weight over the past few months, but not enough for anyone else on this planet to notice.
She slipped her arm through mine and pulled me to her. “I’ve lost a few pounds too. Had to. I’d nearly gone over my Lifetime.” Rose needed to maintain a certain weight for the privilege of inspiring her rather cultish Monday-morning following.
“We’ll have a little brunchy and then leave these boys to their football,” she said, although she didn’t need to tell me the plan; we’d been following the same routine for years.
Rose kept an immaculate house that always smelled like fresh air. This sense of order was important to Sam, so I kept our house clean too, although I’d always been a bit of a slob as a child. Rose had already set the dining-room table for Thanksgiving. “We’ll be eighteen tonight,” she told me, and reeled off the guests she’d invited. The Blumfields had been celebrating Thanksgiving with the Hirshes since Sam was in diapers. The group expanded and contracted based on which of each family’s children were able to make it. Neil celebrated Thanksgiving with Jenny’s family.
Washing the Dead Page 29