Between You and Me

by Scott Nadelson

  So that was it. No one but he would know what had happened. He could tell people in the office, if he wanted, and Cynthia, but even in his imagination the words sounded too ordinary. They didn’t capture the blast of car horns, the whoosh of air against his knees. They had no way of bringing back the softness of the child’s legs against his arm, the fruity sour smell of her breath. On his way back to work he passed the carousel again, and only now did he take notice of the horses beneath the bobbing children, their faces frozen in expressions of excruciating pain, as if the golden poles keeping them in place had been driven down through their saddles and straight into their backs.

  A Complete Unknown

  1997

  Just before his office phone rang, Paul had been debating whether or not to leave work early and enjoy the last stretch of fading daylight. It was mid-September, cloudless, just enough breeze to occasionally lift a flag on a nearby rooftop, rippling it for a moment before letting it drop. His receptionist had already gone. His hand hovered over the receiver for four full rings. Leave it, he thought, before picking up to hear a young woman’s urgent voice. Without announcing who was speaking, she told him she was pregnant, her boyfriend was moving to Miami, she was sorry, she was leaving tomorrow. For a moment Paul thought it was Joy, and he couldn’t decide if he was supposed to congratulate her; she was twenty-five, living in San Diego, and last Paul had heard she was on her third boyfriend in as many months.

  Only when the woman said, “I know I’m supposed to give two weeks notice, and if you don’t want to pay me, I guess that’s your right,” did he realize it was the nurse’s aide he’d recently contracted to care for his mother, who last spring had broken a hip and begun what Paul suspected would be an excruciating decline. His sister Reggie had encouraged him to move her to an assisted living facility, had even given him the name of one she’d heard good things about, but he wasn’t ready. He’d interviewed more than a dozen people for in-home care and hired this one not only because she was the most attractive but because she’d promised to stay at least a year. But now she said, “I’ll leave breakfast out for her, but you’ll probably want to get here before noon. She gets cranky if her lunch isn’t ready on time.”

  Paul didn’t take betrayal lightly. Or at least he didn’t want to. He’d always liked to think of himself as a person who stood his ground, who wouldn’t let anyone cross him without consequences. When the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, he’d sworn not only to give up allegiance to the team he’d devoted himself to since he was old enough to walk from his parents’ house on Crown Street to Ebbets Field but quit following baseball altogether. Basketball, too, for good measure. Football he’d never cared for. From then on, he decided, he’d watch only tennis and golf, automatically rooting for the underdog.

  The problem was, he couldn’t just abandon Gil Hodges like that, or Newcombe, or Duke and Pee Wee, or that new kid Koufax, who hadn’t yet lived up to his promise. So he snuck glances at box scores and caught a few games on the radio, and when Gil hit his 300th home run, he secretly cheered. A few years later, when the league expanded and a new team came to Queens of all places, he went straight out and bought tickets for opening day. He was doubly proud when Koufax threw his first no-hitter against Paul’s very own hapless Mets. It was a good day for the Long Island boroughs, for Jews, for people with split or shaky loyalties.

  By then he was in college, and what interested him even more than baseball was folk music. Because he didn’t yet know how to drive, he spent a whole day on buses and trains to get from Cornell to Newport in order to hear Pete Seeger singing with Sonny Terry. That was the first and only time he slept on a beach. The only time he skipped class was when Dave Van Ronk played a coffee house in Ithaca. And when Dylan went electric, he was as outraged as any of his folkie friends. He gave away his 45s of Peter, Paul, and Mary singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” He stopped listening to Joan Baez, too, for not having done more to prevent the travesty. Eventually he sold his record player and shaved off the uneven start of a beard. He quit drinking coffee. Not even half a decade later he voted for Nixon and then lied about it to his mother, who wouldn’t have forgiven him.

  But lately, while driving the Imperial to the station for his morning commute, or to theater rehearsals at the JCC—he’d recently played Sergeant Toomey in Biloxi Blues—he’d turn the dial of his radio, and catching a few beats of a tune he found compelling, would pause and listen, only to realize he was hearing Dylan’s nasal honk, backed by drums and organ and electric guitar. And instead of snapping it off, he’d let the song play through, sheepishly drumming his thumbs on the steering wheel, enjoying, despite himself, the twang of guitar and the pulse of rhythm. After hearing it a second time, he’d hum along, and though he found the lyrics too complex to sing—far more so than the songs he’d memorized in college—later, at work, he’d find a few phrases playing over in his mind.

  For the past seventeen years he’d lived less than a mile from Greystone Park, the state mental hospital where Dylan had made his famous visits to a dying Woody Guthrie. Until recently, it had never occurred to him to wonder about the nature of their conversations, to imagine what wisdom might have passed between them. But now, whenever he rolled slowly through the shadows cast by the original asylum buildings, stately and neglected, the site of well-documented scandals and unknown atrocities, he couldn’t help picturing the two of them in a cold bare cell, strumming guitars, discussing old ballads. He’d always driven these roads slowly—there were crosswalks every block, the occasional bewildered patient shuffling over the pavement, and speed traps at either end of the hospital grounds—but now he’d pass at a crawl, glancing up at the high barred windows in the stone façade.

  Did Dylan describe his strangest dream? Did Woody tell stories of life on the road? “Follow your own path,” Paul imagined him saying. “They’ll call you Judas, but you’ll get over it.”

  Though she’d left after twenty-eight days, Paul sent the nurse’s aide her full month’s pay. He scrambled to find a replacement, this time calling a service since he had no time to place an ad or conduct interviews. But when the agent said it would be at least two weeks before they could send someone, he called half the assisted living facilities in the city. The only one with an open apartment was the one Reggie had suggested, which wasn’t his first choice. The last thing he wanted was for his mother to think he’d chosen the cheapest place he could find, especially since he had to pay an enormous fee to book the apartment on such short notice.

  He begged Reggie to help with the move, but she already had other commitments, she said, she couldn’t just drop everything and put her life on hold every time her mother needed her, and besides, she went on, hardly taking a breath, Paul was the favorite child, the one her mother had always coddled, and why should she spend her day listening to the complaints of a woman who’d never respected her, never took the time to understand her interests, never did anything but criticize her clothing, her hairstyles, her cooking, her romantic attachments. “Good luck,” she finished. “Tell her I’m out of town. Up on the Cape or something. Tell her I don’t have a phone there.”

  His mother had been shrinking for years, the bones in her back compressing and bending her forward, and since her fall she stood crookedly, leaning on a cane. The top of her head reached no higher than the base of Paul’s neck, but still he pictured her as he’d known her fifty years before, towering over him, feet spread apart, hands on hips, head wagging. His whole life she’d worn her hair up in a tight bun, giving her another two inches on his father, who’d stood five-three in shoes. In the hospital, though, while her hip was healing, the bun had collapsed, and her hair had tangled. To Paul’s astonishment, she’d agreed to let the nurses cut it into a short curly bob that ended just beneath her chin. The rest they saved and braided into a rope, and when Paul came to visit on the weekend his mother showed it to him with pride, first holding it up and then swinging i
t down hard on her blanket, where her knee must have been. He couldn’t believe how long it was, longer than his forearm and hand combined, fingers extended. How had so much hair fit together in a ball not much bigger than his fist? The bun must have been so tight his mother would have felt her scalp stretch whenever she moved her jaw.

  Without it, her face did seem looser, eyes hooded and dreamy, brows arched expressively, a little smirk on one side of her mouth, white ringlets resting on either cheek. Paul might have believed she was laughing at him—because he’d put on a few pounds, maybe? because he’d made the mistake of wearing a blazer in the car and had sweat rings under his arms?—if he didn’t see the same smirk an hour later, when she was sleeping. He supposed it was the morphine that gave her such a placid look, but he couldn’t help wondering if the haircut had something to do with it, too, releasing her from a long confinement.

  On the day of the move she still wore the smirk, though she’d been off morphine for more than a month and was now, if she remembered to take any pills without the nurse’s aide to dole them out, down to two Percocet a day. And she did seem amused as he made her breakfast, sticking a frozen biscuit sandwich in the microwave and then squirting cheese onto his sweater when he cut it into small triangles she could fork into her mouth. He’d worn casual clothes for the occasion—khaki chinos, old brown loafers—and had even brought a pair of Cynthia’s garden gloves to carry boxes, but the sweater was merino wool, and now he’d have to bring it to the dry cleaners. She didn’t laugh or make a remark as he scrubbed the greasy spot with her sponge, just looked up at him from the awkward angle caused by her hunched back, blinking and smirking. He hoped the expression meant something—that she was enjoying her new station in life, maybe, that she found humor and lightness in it after a bitter decade since Paul’s father had died. But when he put the plate in front of her she wrinkled her nose and said with familiar resentment, “About time.”

  “You’re welcome,” Paul said.

  She brought a forkful to her mouth, studied it, and set it back down. “It’s plain.”

  “What do you mean, plain? It’s got eggs and cheese.”

  “I like the, what’s it called. The pink stuff. Salty.”

  “Bacon?”

  “No, the other one. Softer.”

  “Ham? Since when did you start eating pork?” He opened the freezer, but there were no other biscuits, nothing but orange juice concentrate and a bag of corn kernels covered with ice crystals. “You’ll have to settle for egg and cheese.”

  “The girl ate them all.”

  “What girl?”

  “The colored one.”

  “Demond? The cleaning lady?”

  “The other one. The brown one.”

  “I don’t know any brown girls,” Paul said.

  “Spanish,” his mother said. “Porturican. Whatever it’s called. Hardly wears any clothes.”

  “Jessica. The nurse you scared away. She’s Cuban.”

  “Every time she bends over you see all the way to her belly button.”

  “You don’t have to worry about seeing it anymore. And I’m sure she didn’t eat your biscuits.” All around were things he needed to pack into boxes before the movers arrived in the late afternoon: dishes and glasses, massive photo albums with scuffed covers, his mother’s collection of porcelain dolls. Most of it, along with the furniture, would go into his basement until his stepkids were ready to fight over who would take what. Reggie had claimed the dolls and expected Paul to double-park outside her building on West Fourth and run them upstairs. He had no time to argue about ham. “Please. Just eat what you’ve got.”

  She made no move to pick up the fork, just watched as he began to load a box with the few things she’d take to her new home. New and last, he couldn’t help thinking. Her eyes tracked him from the kitchen to the hutch in the dining room, where he wrapped a decorative china bowl she’d never once used, as far as Paul knew, in three sheets of newsprint. It unnerved him to have her staring, saying nothing. He’d made sure to remind her of the move every day for the last week, but he didn’t know what she retained. Most of his life he’d known far too much of what she thought. She’d never kept a thing to herself, especially not a thing to do with her displeasure. He’d heard weekly that he didn’t visit often enough, that his wife was haughty, that his stepchildren would never love him as a father. For the past ten years he’d heard over and over how disappointing her marriage had been: how his father had never taken her anywhere; how he’d never, in fifty years, bought her a present she liked; how he’d never learned to dance though he knew dancing made her happier than anything.

  Now Paul wished she’d tell him she didn’t want to go. She might have shouted at him: why don’t you just put me straight in the grave. He wished she’d at least acknowledge that she knew what was happening. He wished she’d take a bite of the damn biscuit. Most of all he wished she’d stop smirking at him.

  “It’s a while before lunch,” he said. “You’ll be hungry. And you can’t take your pills on an empty stomach.” No answer, no movement but blinking eyelids. “You’re going to like it there,” he said for at least the tenth time in the past few days. He’d said it to himself at least a hundred times more, which still wasn’t nearly enough to make him believe it. “You won’t be alone so much. It’ll be nice to eat with other people, don’t you think? And they’ve got a card room, and exercise classes, and guest speakers. It’ll be like living at the old club on Utica Avenue. Only there’s no pool.”

  Into the box he placed things she probably had no room for in the new place, less than half the size of this apartment. Crystal candlesticks. A brass ashtray she’d never allowed his father to use. A dozen photographs in musty frames: one of her and her teenage friends—“the girls,” she still called them, though all but two had died and those left were in their mid-eighties—wearing slinky dresses and flapper hats; one of his father; another of Paul and Reggie; several of Joy and Kyle, whom she’d never treated as real grandchildren, though they were the only ones she’d ever have. “It’ll be easier for me to visit there,” he said. “I can take a cab up at lunchtime. When I can get away, that is. Maybe once a month or so. We can take a walk to the park when your hip’s better.”

  The next time he passed through the dining room he stopped at the table, lifted the fork to her mouth, wiggled it back and forth. But she wouldn’t open. The ringlets on her cheeks were girlish, and Paul had a vision of what she’d been like as a child: stubborn, selectively mute, inscrutable. At times he’d regretted never having had the experience of raising an infant, longing for the hardships he’d heard new parents complain about with such false, dreamy frustration. But he suspected now—or rather admitted to himself what he’d known all along—that he would have been lousy at feeding and changing diapers and shaking rattles. He had no patience for it. He dropped the fork, harder than he meant to, and it bounced off her plate onto the table. The triangle of biscuit slipped off the tines and leaked oily cheese onto the wood. He wiped it up, cleaned off the crumbs, replaced the fork. His mother sat and blinked.

  “You’re a grown-up,” he said. “If you want to be hungry, that’s your business.”

  In the bedroom, he tried to breathe easier, but his lungs felt as if they’d been cinched with wire, halfway up. He transferred clothes from her dresser into two suitcases. A decade after he was gone, the room still held the memory of his father’s cigars. The smoke was in the wallpaper, he supposed, in the carpet and curtains, in his father’s old leather armchair, the seat upholstery cracked and split in the middle, with a bit of cotton stuffing poking out. Paul had already decided to take the chair to his office, though he hardly had any room for it. He refused to imagine it in Kyle’s apartment, or cradling the backside of one of Joy’s California boyfriends.

  He shouldn’t have felt sentimental about this apartment. His parents had moved in only a few years before his father’s health began to fail, and the time they’d spent here had been mostly mise
rable. He didn’t associate it with his childhood, a borough away. He felt no connection to Forest Hills, though it was only one subway stop from Shea Stadium, and over the past decade he’d taken in a few dozen Mets games after stopping in to see his mother. It had been a place of loneliness for her, a place Paul associated with guilt and obligation, a place to which he always dreaded returning. He should have been happy to see it go.

  “Just memories.”

  He gave a start, in part because he hadn’t heard his mother approach, and in part because he was afraid she’d read his mind. She was standing in the doorway, leaning on her cane, her new ringlets lit up from behind by the hallway light. He was tempted to add that some memories are worth forgetting. Instead he piled more clothes into the suitcase, hastily now. One of her blouses bunched up, but he didn’t bother to smooth it before laying a pair of slacks on top. “Lot more memories to come,” he said.

  She waved a hand in front of her face as if to bat away his words. “Like a dream,” she said.

  When he finished with the clothes, finished with a long struggle to zip the second suitcase, he wasn’t quite ready to leave the room. “You’ve probably got space for a painting,” he said. “Want to take any of these?” He hadn’t looked at the paintings for years. Or maybe he’d never looked at them. They hadn’t been in his parents’ bedroom in Crown Heights, and he didn’t know when they’d appeared. A landscape with mountains and trees. A portrait of a dreamy young woman looking off to one side. A Paris street scene, with sidewalk cafés, iron balconies, people and dogs similarly groomed and morose. Paris, a place his mother had always wanted to go, where his father never took her.

  Only then did he notice what was hanging above the bed. “Where the hell did that come from?”

  His mother was silent again. Maybe she shrugged, maybe she didn’t. He slipped off his shoes and climbed up. The mattress squeaked, a sound he found nauseating.