by Amy Bloom
“Play ‘Woolly Bully,’ ” said the tired Jersey voice. A housewife/mother voice, a three glasses of canned juice, three bowls of leftover Cheerios floating in thin, sweet milk by 7:25 a.m. voice. Screaming at the kids to remember their books, remember their notes, remember not to let the cat out. Kisses to remind them that she screams only because she loves them, wants them to succeed, wants them to be somebody. And then there is nobody home until three. A no-power, no-money voice.
“Okay,” said the flat smirky deejay. “And do you have a woolly bully, ma’am?” Like he’s behind her in the supermarket, laughing at her fat ass and curlers and the bent-in backs of her loafers.
“Oh yeah, honey. I did used to have one … but I divorced him.”
She’d fooled them both, and the deejay laughed with Elizabeth, in the pleasure of acknowledging grace and steel where they hadn’t seen it. Maybe he, like Elizabeth, imagined the caller as a mother, imagined the watery orange juice coming with the kind of mothering you never stop trying to get, or get away from.
“Lady, you can call me anytime.”
“Likewise,” the woman said. “So, put on my man, Sam the Sham,” she said.
Elizabeth sang along. She began a list with her right hand.
In his hospital room, newspapers beginning to pile up by the bed, roses wilting on rubbery stems, Max made his offer.
“If you come stay with me for a little, you might get to watch me die. Or kill me at your leisure. Could you stick around?”
Elizabeth wheeled him to the car, sliding him into the backseat. Two orderlies stood by as if to help, but Elizabeth managed to bang Max’s head against the car door and they didn’t move.
“I want you to live, Max.” She buckled his seat belt.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he said, “I always try to give you what you want.”
“No. You gave me what you wanted me to have. I’m not arguing with you. I want you to live.”
“I don’t think so, baby.”
Elizabeth put her face an inch from Max’s ear and spoke very softly and clearly.
“You better fucking live. If you don’t make up your mind to live, I’m going to camp in your goddamned room and make sure you get intravenous nourishment and no painkiller. Okay? You better fucking live.”
Oh, Do Not Let the World Depart
“Elizabeth, if you could get Max out of the place for a few hours, I could fix it up a bit.”
“Mother, he hates to go out. Why can’t you do what you’re going to do while he’s here?”
“I’m sorry, old thing. I simply can’t.”
Elizabeth understood that it wasn’t a problem of logistics. Margaret could not make beauty in the presence of death. Elizabeth was only getting through the year by keeping her eyes closed. She hadn’t looked in a mirror or even directly into Max’s face for weeks. Why should Margaret step up to unnecessary pain?
“All right,” Elizabeth said, “we’ll go out to Mad Nan’s Orchards and get some apples and feed the ducks. You know, I can’t have him out for more than two and a half, three hours. Is that enough?”
“Fine. Call me when you’re about to get your car.”
“Mother, we don’t need split-second timing for this. It’s not a military maneuver, for Christ’s sake.”
“I am coming with three assistants and a van. I am going to do everything but paint, and I promise not to rearrange his books or records. I don’t think Max would like to feel that I’m doing him a large favor, do you? I do think he can tolerate the idea that your mother is coming in to tidy things up a little, and to make her daughter’s life more pleasant. All right?”
“All right. Jesus, Margaret, what a business. But thank you. What day?”
“Go for a spin on Thursday. That gives me four days to set things up and get these blighters moving.”
“You do that, you get those blighters moving. Thank you.” Elizabeth put down the phone. Was God obliged to close one big window in order to crack open this ridiculously tiny door?
Elizabeth used to stand in the kitchen of her parents’ house, before Margaret had her downtown office, listening to her mother do business in that same happy, crisp, pugnacious voice. Four months ago, standing in Max’s small, dirty kitchen, helping bag chicken breasts and turkeyburgers, her mother tried again.
She asked Elizabeth to talk to her husband’s partner.
Elizabeth said, “Rachel”—now that Rachel was a doctor, Margaret no longer flinched when she was mentioned—“says Zoltow’s very friendly with his female patients, friendly to the point of lawsuit.” She slid two skinless chicken breasts onto a plate of Mrs. Dash and flipped them over.
“I’m sure Aaron could suggest someone else, then. A woman.”
“Why would I go?”
“This is no way to live.” Margaret waved her small hand around the three crowded rooms, the couch covered with blankets and Elizabeth’s underwear, the dying plants, the cornucopia of medications spilled across the kitchen table. “You’re twenty-four. Why are you doing this? Do tell me. I would like to know.”
“He’s going to die, and he was there for me when I needed him. It’s all right. It won’t take that long.”
Margaret nodded. Considering they’d never discussed Elizabeth’s relationship with Max and that Margaret never allowed herself to think anything untoward about his constant and fatherly affection for her daughter, grateful that some paternal figure had kept his hand in, it was amazing how quickly she understood. “Nothing I can say, then? Trip to Europe, that sort of thing?”
Elizabeth shook her head and put her hand out to wipe crumbs off the counter. If she had known that her mother would never again have money to spare, she might have said yes and seen Paris.
Margaret caught her by the wrist. She blinked hard and did not cry and did not say, Is your life so terrible that you prefer this? She pulled Elizabeth’s hand so close Elizabeth could feel her mother’s warm breath on her palm. Margaret said, “You need a manicure,” and pulled out a fresh bottle of Cherries in the Snow and an orange stick.
“Max, on Thursday my mother’s coming to do a little housecleaning for us and hang a few pictures.”
Max opened his eyes, his hair sticking up all over his head, like a great grey baby.
“Pictures? I can’t wait. The entire history of the Empire, in jewel tones, right here in my boudoir. Tell her thanks.”
“I did.”
He closed his eyes again, tugging the comforter up over his shoulders. When he was a little boy, he loved and imitated his stepfathers Irish tenor, the only sweet sound in a house of Mississippi ululation and breaking glass. “’Twas on the Isle of Capri that I met her, something something a thin golden ring on her finger, ’twas good-bye on the Isle of Capri.” The edge of the comforter poked his leaking right eye. He pulled it beneath his chin, pretended to sleep, and slept.
He woke up to find Elizabeth in his mother’s pale blue velvet cloche and the pale blue wool peplum jacket she’d worn to demonstrate sobriety, and a withered white garter belt, with its rusty metal clasps swinging back and forth over Elizabeth’s cotton panties. She wore her own basketball sneakers and white socks.
“Nice, huh?”
“Very. Interesting. Who are you?”
“Your mother? I couldn’t get into the skirt. She must have been tiny.”
“She was small. You’re quite a bit taller. Bigger-boned, I’d say.” He might be old, he might be dying, he might be every kind of fool, as his history demonstrated, but he had never told a woman she was fatter than another woman.
“I didn’t know you had all these women’s clothes. Fetish?” Elizabeth perched on the end of the couch.
“I guess. I never wanted to throw out all my mother’s stuff, so I just threw it into my footlocker and took it with me. I don’t think I’ve opened it in twenty years.”
“How’d she die?”
“Cirrhosis. A very ugly way to die, I hear. I wasn’t there.”
Elizabeth put the
back of her hand to her forehead, staggered around the couch, and collapsed in front of Max.
“I think I would have made a great Camille.”
“Probably. Except for your robust good health. And your sneakers.”
“I do love you. Was your mother kind of a party girl?”
“She liked a good time. She drank quite a bit, she had a lot of boyfriends between husbands. Or so it seemed to me, when I was a boy. Was there anything you wanted in there?”
Elizabeth pulled out a crumbling straw hat with chipped flocked velvet cherries on the brim.
“Hey, a come-fuck-me hat. There have to be shoes to match.”
Max closed his eyes.
“Did I offend you? I’m sorry.”
“You meant to offend me. This isn’t much of a sport, sweetheart. Getting at me is shooting fish in a barrel.”
“But if you really want the fish shot, what better arrangement?” She took off the cloche and the jacket and put on the hat. She took off her sneakers and socks. She put a wide elastic belt, a cluster of plastic cherries concealing the clasp, around her waist and kicked off her underpants.
“What do you want from me?” he said.
“I don’t know. You don’t have any money, what with Greta’s house and Greta’s shrink and Danny’s darkroom and Marc’s whatever. Why do we send Marc money?”
“Because he is getting a small design business off the ground in Lyons and he needs some start-up capital.”
Elizabeth lay down on the floor beside the couch, her breasts brushing Max’s fingertips. He pulled his hand up to his chest.
“Yeah. And because you feel guilty.”
“And because I feel guilty.”
“Don’t you feel guilty toward me?”
“You know I do.”
“This is a pretty funny apology, right? Come nurse me through this illness and let me try to make it up to you.”
“I am sorry, Elizabeth. You were very kind to come take care of me. I know I loved you too much and too soon.”
“The fuck you did.” Elizabeth took his hand and pressed his palm over her breast. She sat up over him, her knees on either side of his chest.
“Touch me. Touch me now.”
Max put his hands down, resting them on her cold heels.
“Now you don’t want to?”
“I’m tired.”
“You’re scared.”
“I’m scared because I don’t know what you want. You can’t want me.”
“Why not? And if I don’t really want you—I mean, you’re right, I don’t—maybe I want something from you.”
“I’m really tired.”
“What was your mother’s name?”
“Louisa.”
“Call me Louisa. Touch me there and call me Louisa.”
Max didn’t say no (he was not as scared as Elizabeth wanted him to be, but he was uncomfortable and he was angry; he’s dying, for Christ’s sake). He closed his eyes. Soft, matted hair brushed his nose and lips. He smelled her.
“Is this necessary?”
“It’s hard to say. Was I necessary for you?”
“Oh, sweetheart, why don’t you just leave? You don’t have to take care of me. Take the hat, take my passbook, and just go.”
“I don’t want to go. I want to stay here and be Louisa, that sweet little thing. Do you think having an alcoholic slut for a mother is what made you chase little girls?”
He wanted to say, You were not little. You were a young woman, and I was wrong, but you were not a little girl. He coughed very hard, bouncing Elizabeth on his chest.
She stood up and handed him a kleenex.
“Never mind,” she said.
She left the cherry-trimmed hat on and dressed in her own clothes.
“I’m sorry, Pops.”
“Forget it. I owe you.”
Elizabeth looked away. “Yeah. Well. Can I keep the hat?”
On Thursday he was better. She found a bright red flannel shirt for him, and in his black overcoat and black beret he looked frail and chic, a French grandfather driving out to inspect the vineyards.
“Let’s go feed the ducks, and we can pick up a couple of bags of apples. I’ll make an apple pie.”
“I never understood ‘feeding the ducks.’ Think about it. We buy stale bread so we can have the pleasure of feeding the ducks, who can’t be hungry, since they’re always being fed. And the store maintains the ducks so it can sell us stale bread. There are no more starving children? We have to come up with this arrangement so we can all play Marie Antoinette by the pond?”
He shut his eyes and Elizabeth kept driving, glad he was talking. It was always a good sign when he had the energy to talk, no matter what he said. Even if it was about the stupid ducks.
Max thought, Why am I talking about this?
He sat on a bench while Elizabeth fed the ducks, and when she sprinkled breadcrumbs right at his feet, two fat black ducks came up, honking mildly. They were dirtier than she had imagined, something dark caked into the tiny holes on top of their beaks, algae and muck trailing their orange feet.
Max ignored them for a while, pulling his beret down over his eyes, covertly enjoying the sun on his shoulders and legs. The ducks pecked around the bench, and when he shuffled his feet a few times, they retreated and then came back, honking a little louder, pecking more aggressively.
“They must be female,” he said, smiling. She didn’t answer him except to bite down on an apple and chew it loudly. Max could no longer chew apples.
They drove home in silence, and when Max touched her thigh, Elizabeth looked down at the trembling loose skin and patted his hand. There’s no point in being mad, she thought. There’s not enough time. I could yell at him and then he’d keel over and the last thing I would have said would be, Don’t be an asshole, Max.
That’s how you know you’re dying, Max thought. I could burn her clothes, shit in the kitchen, wave my dick at the goddamned ducks, and she’d just smile and pat my hand.
Max’s place was tidier, piles consolidated and concealed, the air filled with motes of lemon furniture polish, ten pink roses as open as bowls, but it was not transformed. Elizabeth was glad she hadn’t mentioned Margaret’s true and apparently grandiose intentions. Her mother had failed; it still smelled like seeping death.
“Nice roses your mother left. Nice vacuuming. Thank her for me.”
“Maybe you could. When I call. TV?” Elizabeth steadied Max on her hip, pulled off his coat, and held him up with one hand while she reached out to clear the recliner and slide him down into it. She saw that the recliner was empty, in an alien, pristine, showroomlike state.
Max patted the cushions. “All right. I wonder where she put my stuff?” He shut his eyes. “How about those monks?” Yesterday Family Feud had monks versus nuns and Max laughed until he cried.
“Okay, you watch. I gotta go out now, just for a little while.”
Elizabeth picked up her keys.
“Where are you going?”
“We need some stuff, Max. I’ll be back in an hour.”
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Can’t Turn You Loose
She saw him from the diner window, coming around the corner from the parking lot, his jacket flapping over his high country behind. Suit, white shirt, red tie. Polished black loafers on his big country feet. More waist now, just a little bit of gut pressing against his belt. Big, easy comfort, a long velvet-sofa man. Still those long legs and arms, coming past the rotating dessert tower.
“Well, Liz Taube. Bless your heart, good to see you again,” Huddie said, and put out his hand.
Elizabeth stared like it had turned from hand to snake as he spoke. “Bless my heart?”
Huddie slid into the booth and leaned forward.
“Elizabeth? Liz? You still go by Liz? I work in this town, I own a business here now. I have customers in here, Nikos and I are on the same delivery run. You have no goddamned idea. You never did. I am a model minority
businessman. I am a family man, I give to the church, hell, I give to the synagogue. You want me to stick my tongue down your throat by way of hello? Bad enough you showed up in my store like the Ghost of Christmas Past.”
“What are you so pissy about? It’s been seven years and you’re the one that’s married, not me. You’ve got babies, I don’t. Excuse me, I would have written when you were in Buttfuck, Alabama, but you didn’t. And I didn’t know you were back.” Elizabeth looked down. “Running your father’s store. Christ.”
The waiter stood by the table, grinning at Huddie.
“Hey, George, how’s it going?”
“Good, Hud. Going good now.” He licked the tip of his pencil, willing to wait for twenty minutes if that was how long Huddie took. George worked two nights at week at Nassau Produce, Huddie’s store, and Huddie paid for twenty-two English classes, something his cousin Nikos didn’t give a good goddamn about. If Huddie Lester wanted to take his time about ordering coffee, and then take this angry, sort of pretty girl to the motel next door, that was fine with George Pascopolous. Huddie Lester was his man.
“Give us a few minutes, buddy.”
“Okay, Hud, when you want me, you do like so.” George raised one finger discreetly.
She would have kicked Huddie under the table if he hadn’t made her feel that everyone in the diner was watching them, completely fascinated. All that time apart, and now together, and it was not the same, of course, and this conversation would do nothing for them.
His jacket cuff rode up on his sleeve, showing a half-circle of brown skin through the white shirt.
“Are we having a conversation?” Elizabeth ran her palm over the Formica, rolling sugar granules with her fingertips.