On the walk home I was confused by the prismatic brightness of the sun. I felt a scalding heaviness, an urging into ground. I stared at my feet, clinging as best I could to each moment. With every step forward, I took two more down, walking heavily in the heat like entering at a diagonal into dirt, weary like a miner, filthy already before the day.
——
“The scariest part was the drip,” I explained to Jack, “the knowledge that her body was dehydrated and unable to retain fluid.”
Nurses would inject needles into the bag instead of into her arm. The bag was buxom, but Maman’s arm was like a broken-off branch. I would watch the liquid bubbles come down the intravenous tube and into her, grateful for the entry of every drop into her starved body.
Once we were watching her sleep, and I asked Kate if she remembered the old Little Audrey cartoon about drought, when Audrey’s garden dries up in the heat and only one drop escapes from the hose spigot.
“Kate kept saying she didn’t remember,” I told Jack. “And I kept saying, ‘Yes, you do. Remember the way the flowers had drooping heads and limp leaves and crying faces? And the rivers burned out and the fish sat in the sand, fanning themselves?’ She just kept saying ‘No, I don’t remember, no.’ But I know we saw it together. I guess, I guess she just—”
Jack kissed my head, pulling me closer in.
Mornings are best for hospital visits. Uniforms are neat, halls are clean, moods are generally blithe. Pain loses some of its drama in day. In the morning tanned doctors with abstruse test results and breezy manners make you think of all the golf you’re missing even if you’d never consider playing. In the morning the newspaper cart comes around and the sunshine plays against the walls, like bouncing balls. There is a collective feeling of hope.
“In the evening,” I told Jack, “there’s only waiting for day.”
And the drone of televisions and uncollected dinner trays and fluorescent light. There is the feeling that something has run down in the world like a tank out of gas and that the great machine is winding into crisis. Beneath you, in the emergency room, great tragedies transpire, night tragedies. And when your visit has ended and it’s time to go home, you go fully conscious of leaving your loved one alone with their illness, like leaving a child to sleep with a monster in the closet.
“Kate lost a mother,” I said, “but I lost nothing.”
“Kate doesn’t feel that way,” Jack assured me.
“But what about everybody besides Kate? How can I ever explain to anyone what Maman was to me when our relationship had no name? People need names. I wasn’t a relative or a friend,” I said. “I was just an object of her kindness.”
He wiped my cheeks, saying “Ssshh.” I buried my face in his shoulder.
“Kindness is everything,” I went on. “When you receive it and express it, it becomes the whole meaning of things. It’s life, demystified. A place out of self. Not a waltz, but the whirls within a waltz.”
“You’re the one now,” Jack said definitively. “That’s why you met her. She had something she needed to pass on.”
One day I tiptoed past the woman in the first bed and set my things on the chair. It was one of those toffee-colored vinyl hospital-style easy chairs that make you think of germs and bad luck. Usually I leaned against the window ledge or sat on the bed.
“Your mother’s not here, dear,” the woman called over. “They took her to radiology.”
I’d noticed the new name on the doorway—Krieger. There was always a new name—someone coming in, someone transferring out, someone getting well and going home. Maman’s turn never came. Things kept happening. The last thing was pneumonia.
“She’s not my mother, Mrs. Krieger. But thank you anyway.”
“Not your mother? An aunt?”
“My friend’s mother.”
She examined me, one eye half-closed. “Your parents dead?”
“No,” I said, thinking, Not exactly. I peeled the newspaper off the wildflowers I’d brought from my garden. “I’d better get these in water.”
She waved her hand, excusing me. “Just pull the drape open, will you?” I complied, and Mrs. Krieger rolled to face the hall. “These doctors. They expect you to recover in the dark.”
At the nurse’s station, a brown arm reached automatically over the counter with scissors. It was Mrs. Eden—Sara’s mom—and the scissors were the special kind with the angled blades and rounded tip used for cutting adhesives, sutures, and flaps of skin. The nurses did not lend them out because they were supposed to be sanitary, but they made an exception for me. “You’re starting to read my mind, Mrs. Eden.”
She continued to tend to business. “Maybe not your mind, but certainly your footsteps.”
Nurses have a lot of business to attend to. That’s why they do not always get to you right away unless you are irrefutably dying. Marilyn is a surgical nurse at New York Hospital. She calls paperwork lawsuit avoidance detail.
I returned and dumped the old flowers in the bathroom. The water in the vase was gray like sodden cardboard, with a putrid smell. I hadn’t changed it for two days. A lot can happen in two days, in the organic sense.
“My daughter’s bringing bagels Saturday,” Mrs. Krieger said loudly.
I poked my head around the door. “Are you allowed to do that?”
“Well, you know what it’s like when you’re dying for a bagel.”
“Actually,” I said, “I’ve never had one.”
“Never had a bagel? That’s ridiculous. How do you read the Sunday papers?”
“I don’t know. I guess I usually just eat toast.”
“When my brother worked in Geneva,” Mrs. Krieger said, “my late husband and I would pack fresh bagels on dry ice and ship them from the Upper West Side to my niece in Paris, who would take them by train when she visited him.”
I placed the vase on the food tray between the beds and stood by her.
“We called it the Bagel Connection,” she said sadly. She studied the edge of the sheet, threading it through both sets of fingers. When she spoke again, she spoke quietly, as though the disease might hear. “It’s in my lymph nodes, you know,” she confided.
In her voice was the gravest echo. In her voice I could hear the place her soul could see. I felt sorry to have to leave her there, detached like a balloon adrift, unbefriended and surely sort of homesick.
“Do you know what lymph nodes are?” she asked. She looked beautiful to me, wide-eyed and shiny, like a ladybug.
“Yes,” I said, looking to the ground. “Like glands.”
“Oh, so you know about lymph nodes but not bagels. What a world I’m leaving.”
——
I called Kate one day near the end. I didn’t know it was near the end, it just worked out that way. I said I couldn’t make it to the hospital.
“Okay,” she said, not even asking why.
If she’d asked, I might have said that I needed time to think or something. But she didn’t ask. It was as if she’d been expecting me to defect, like she thought I thought I needed a break. Like she had discussed it already with her brother, Laurent, or my mother. For some reason, I ended up telling a lie.
A lie you volunteer is no different from one you’re forced to tell. Forthrightness does not erase the fact that you intend to deceive, especially when the illusion of candor often works to your advantage. The truth was I didn’t want Kate to think I was abandoning her, when in fact I was abandoning her, and I had no idea why. It’s madness, of course, to lie to preserve the perception of your good character.
“I’m filling in for someone,” I said for some reason. “I just got home and now I have to go back. I still smell like beer and fries.”
“Yuck,” Kate said. “Didn’t you shower?”
“Nah.” I took a bite of an apple. “Too tired.” I would have continued, but I didn’t because I’ve noticed that when people lie, they commonly say too much as a way to compensate for all they’re not saying. That’s why it
’s a good rule to eat when you lie. Whenever someone tells me something while they’re eating, I suspect a lie.
“My sister does that shit all the time,” Jack injected.
When I hung up with Kate, I realized that I had to go out for the entire duration of a work shift, from afternoon until midnight, in case she happened to stop by my house on her way home from the hospital to see my mother or something.
“The only place I could think to hide,” I told Jack, “was Montauk.”
“Montauk?” Jack asked. He seemed surprised. “How was it?”
“Okay,” I told him.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” I said.
Twenty minutes before the train left for Montauk, I called my dad at work and killed time by talking to him about things—his job and politics and all these people in my family I never asked about. He kept saying everyone was fine, and then he’d ask again how I was doing.
I’d say, “Good, good. How’s Marilyn?”
“Fine, fine, she’s fine. And you? What are you up to today?”
“Not much.”
It occurred to me that there was a chance he might talk to Kate. He might call back that evening, and if Kate actually did stop by, she might answer the phone and say I was working a double shift, in which case my father would say that he had spoken with me earlier, and that I hadn’t mentioned it. I considered covering myself. I considered telling him the same lie I’d told Kate, or even better—approximately the same lie. I could use the opportunity of a conversation with my father to undo the lie to Kate. I could have told him that I was supposed to fill in for someone at the restaurant but that the waitress called and said she decided to go in after all. That way if he talked to Kate, and Kate found out I hadn’t worked an extra shift, the original lie would sound super-authentic. But I’d never lied to my father, or to my mother. They’d never given me a reason to.
Lying is a full-time occupation, even if you tell just one, because once you tell it, you’re stuck with it. If you want to do it right, you have to visualize it, conjure the graphics, tone, and sequence of action, then relate it purposefully in the midst of seemingly spontaneous dialogue. The more actual the lie becomes to the listener, the more actual it becomes to the teller, which is scariest of all. Some people really get to believing their own lies.
The funeral parlor was air-conditioned and minty. I felt guilty to be relieved to be out of the heat. The walls were lined with flowers that flaunted life, jutting triumphantly into the room.
I asked Jack if he’d ever noticed how arrogant cut flowers can be.
“Actually, yes,” he said, on his parents’ dining room table they could be very arrogant.
My mother and father, Marilyn, Powell, Aunt Lowie, and I signed the guest book, then we took our seats. I walked unsteadily, feeling a little sick from the flower fragrance. Mom informed me that the original intention of funeral flowers was to mask the scent of the dead.
“When Uncle Billy died,” Lowie said, “he was waked on a board in the living room. Remember, Rene? The board was really a door off its hinges propped on a table and a borrowed sawhorse.”
“In those days,” Mom said, “children had to kiss the corpse.”
From my position behind Kate, I was forced to abide the procession of crying faces, crying and advancing for meaningful embraces and European kisses. I felt bad for Kate, sitting and standing, standing and sitting, each time smoothing out the back of her midnight-blue crepe skirt. If there were rules, she seemed to know them—I wondered how. Together with her brother, she acknowledged each person’s nearness to the dead and helped the group in its struggle for order—who grieved most, whose pain was most real—because in life there is always hierarchy, and it is frankly not profitable to remain modest and anonymous, not even at a funeral. Kate set aside her own despondency to render gratitude for sympathy received.
There was a lyrical aria, Parisian and melancholy, a woman softly singing. My eyes fixed resolutely on the casket; I admired its workmanship, the hinges, the handles, the cherry veneer, the quilted interior. In the crushingly tiny window of my view, I could see people pass, coming upon the body, looking as if looking were nothing, as if her remains were naturally laid out, naturally speechless. I stood and joined the line, moving slowly forward. At each end of the coffin were thick candles in amber glass, massive pekoe sentinels stationed on twining iron holders. Behind them was a framed photograph of Claire with her late husband and their two children. It was a picture I’d taken.
Maman lay still in her pleats of fluted silk. Physically, little had changed in the days since we’d last spoken. I wouldn’t say she looked peaceful, necessarily, but she had the look of self-possession, of satisfied detachment from the relationships that continued to bind survivors to the grind of existence. What I saw was what I’d never seen elsewhere—the look of being done. Maman would give a neat swipe of her arm whenever she’d had enough of whatever, of dinner, of an argument, saying, “Fin.”
She looked well, I thought, with the slenderest of smiles. I kissed my fingers and touched her cheek, leaving her to rest in kingdom and cradle.
——
The last time we spoke, it was a Friday. July thirteenth. Four thirty-three in the afternoon.
Kate had gone outside to talk to the doctor with Laurent and his wife, Simone. I sat at the bed and held Maman’s hand. Her lips were dry; I wet them.
She whispered to me, calling me Babe. Beb. I leaned closer.
“Please,” she entreated, “she is your mother.”
Though we had not been discussing my mother, Maman spoke as if we were concluding a long conversation, which in a way we were. It was a deficit she’d perceived in me from the start because we were a match—what I lacked fit exactly with what she was able to give. Of course I knew my mother loved me. She thought highly of me, automatically, intellectually, by virtue of genetic proximity. Yet, every time we met it was like meeting again, with all I felt compelled to explain and withhold, with all she had forgotten.
Maman’s childhood had been far more difficult than mine. She used to tell us stories of France during the war, when German soldiers patrolled the streets after curfew, when behind locked doors people gathered quietly by the light of a single candle. Once, when she mistakenly spoke out during the enforced silence of dinner, her father removed his cap and threw it at her, forgetting the knot of chewing tobacco he’d stored inside. The hat flew across the table and the wad fell into the tureen of soup and it broke apart like tea leaves, spoiling the precious meal. The family had to go to bed hungry. Her mother was extremely angry. ‘Stup-eed girl,’ elle a dit, Maman would relate to us, mixing languages in her sorry passion.
Kate’s father would nod, corroborating—he’d known his wife since they were children. Maman would sip her Bordeaux and smile, saying of herself, pauvre petite. But I would not smile. I did not like to hear of anyone throwing a hat at her or calling her stupid.
And so it was for us—or, so it had been. She believed in me as a woman separate from herself, and she seemed to take pride in our friendship. This made me feel worthy, and on the inside there was a change in me—a finding, a becoming. One day, perhaps, I would be of equal service to someone.
Her hand shifted slightly. It was a signal, a warning—there was no time to drift. She needed something. In speaking to me, I suspected she spoke to herself. “Tu comprends?”
“Oui,” I said, glad to give something, anything. “Je comprends.”
Her eyes were clear and wet, lustrous and smooth, and she was more present than I could remember her having been in a long time. Inside, something had shifted; it was as though she had moved on. For some reason, I was permitted the honor of joining her there. I felt my soul approach; I felt myself move several steps in, unforgettable steps—they were to be our last. I felt us walking as we’d always walked, with the inside of my arm supporting the nook of her elbow, with the sound of her good brown shoes rapping, with the sweet region
of her powdered cheek grazing mine, with the afflicted melody of her voice, provoking, initiating.
“D’accord, ma petite?” she asked. I laid my face on her bed and nodded into the stiff sheets. She touched my cheek. “Je t’aime.” That was the last thing she said to me. That and, “Be a friend to Catherine.” Ca-trine.
There were three rings, despondent and shrill. “It’s me,” Kate said. “Are you alone?”
I was alone, but it occurred to me that I might not be alone enough. I dragged the phone by its cord into the upstairs bathroom. It was like a miniature body being hauled by the hair, slaggard and obedient. I sat on the tub. “Okay,” I said.
“She’s dead,” Kate said, just like that, and just like that, I told her I was on my way.
I hung up and sat for a while, looking out the window, waiting for the 7:15 train to go by. As I sat, I felt myself undergo a partial breaking. It was as though the forces that had been binding me loosened. When I went down the stairs, I went carefully, feeling conscious of these sudden separations, estrangements between me and the things around me. In the living room, a familiar lamplight warmed the delphinium-blue walls, lined from floor to ceiling with books I’d always known, standing upright on the shelves like soldiers at the ready. The irregular margins in front of the bookshelves were lined with fractured pottery and shards of glass, framed drawings, diplomas, and photographs. No matter how familiar the objects were to me, nothing could fill the new absence I felt.
I turned into the kitchen and met a flare of bright light. My mother was standing where she rarely stood, doing something she almost never did—the dishes.
I heard myself say, “Mom?”
“Yes,” she answered, and she turned.
“The phone,” I said, holding my hand to the light. “It was Kate.”
She rinsed the last dish and placed it carefully in the rack. Taking a towel to dry her hands, she crossed to the table, and she sat. I could see a change in her eyes, in the green, and then nothing. I wondered if Kate would harden as my mother had when she was young and her own mother died. Some people exist quite well in injury. It’s like having gills to breathe underwater. Some people are clever about not drawing others into their affliction. You could hardly tell by looking at my mother that she was a stranger to providence.
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