“How was Green Acres?” her husband would ask, when Catherine came home. He never joined her. He preferred to treat the place like a joke. He was only a few years younger than his mother-in-law.
“She could live with us,” Catherine had said to him once, hesitantly, a test.
“No,” said he, “she absolutely could not.” And Catherine was terribly relieved.
Professor Emeritus Grace Harding sat in the lounge among the others, although in general she preferred the newspaper to the television as a place to receive information. Beside her, unfortunately, sat her only other regular visitor, Yasmin Keene.
“Hi Mama,” Catherine said, resting her hands on her mother’s shoulders. “Hi, Dr. Keene.”
“Catherine,” said Yasmin primly, unhappy as always; her tone of voice always suggested that Catherine had earned yet another demerit. She sat wedged in a wing chair, her brow creased, her heavy lips down-turned, looking for all the world like the chastising high priestess of a disappointing African tribe. This impression was aided by the ebony walking stick she habitually grasped in her right hand, with its fierce carved knob and spiraling length, like a giant corkscrew she might decide to plunge through the heart of somebody, and gladly. She used the stick to walk, to point, to tap against the floor like a scepter as if to call order to a meeting. If one of the cats threatened to approach her chair, Yasmin used her stick to wave it away. Her short Afro was white now, like a cap of popcorn on her black, black head, and her customary outfit was faded, a once-vibrant kente weave, a loose covering that, on anyone else, would be named a muumuu, the tentlike thing with random pleats. Under her incensed gaze, and in spite of the debilitating heat of the room, Catherine decided not to remove her coat and hat; Drs. Yasmin Keene and Grace Harding had always taken a dim view of the attention Catherine paid to dressing herself.
Dress up was for little girls, not grown-ups. Would Catherine never grow up?
“It’s looking like snow,” she said brightly to the group at large. The curmudgeons had initially turned her way, anticipating the moment when Catherine would strip off her coat and display herself, then looked back at the television when she didn’t. Her mother was the only resident without a designated easy chair and blanket out here in the lounge. Struck by stroke, she could no longer speak, but she made her statement regardless: she had a purely temporary relationship to this room and its occupants, to television and the low culture it encouraged. Her damage was a specific cruelty, Catherine thought, her lack of speech. Or it was poetic justice, some scolding moral lesson from myth or fable, her mother the pontificating professor, never without an opinion she could articulate in lengthy, grammatically correct extemporaneous paragraphs, persuasively, downright aggressively, the person who treasured speech above all else, now utterly mute.
Yasmin said, “She didn’t get her Times today.” Her tone of voice said that this was Catherine’s fault. She treated the home like a prison sentence her old colleague had been mistakenly made to serve. Her visits, as a result, were like those of a lawyer to her wrongly accused client. Moreover, Yasmin’s own children, unlike Catherine the frivolous clotheshorse, had all become exemplary citizens in the world of ideas and culture. Surely they would never have moved their mother into a place like Green Acres.
If Catherine were braver, she might say aloud what she often thought: Why didn’t Yasmin offer to share her house with her mother?
But Catherine wasn’t very brave. “I’ll go look,” she told Yasmin, concerning the New York Times.
She located it in the break room, its parts separated, her mother’s room number buried now beneath classifieds and inserts from the local paper. In the past, at the breakfast table, her mother had narrated ceaselessly over the morning’s news. Catherine could still see her father’s colluding smile to her, his nearly imperceptible shrug that forgave and indulged and defused his wife’s tiresome habit, and, as usual, this brought on Catherine’s most frequent recurrent fantasy: her mother and father dying together, both swiftly taken on the same day, neither left to suffer the loss. In her fantasy, her father was not alone when he died but sitting beside her mother. Then he could reach out his hand for her mother’s hand, and the merciful aneurysm that had hit him like a sudden bolt of lightning would carry sufficient buzzing currency to extinguish them both. Tears, as usual, came to Catherine’s eyes.
This was the kind of soft-boiled thinking her mother abhorred. In another wishful fantasy, Catherine granted herself a few helpful siblings with whom she could share this guilty exasperation and wretchedness, an older sister to give her advice, and a couple of older brothers for protection and adoration. Catherine was not made to be an only child. Not made to be half orphaned, either. And who, in the real world, was ever going to witness or reward or punish her for her daily service?
“Earning some stars in your heavenly crown,” her husband would say drolly. Despite the mentholated ointment, Catherine could smell the remains of dinner—breaded meat, boiled root vegetables, some sickening pureed sweet. The residents ate all of their meals depressingly early, and on plastic divided trays nicked and faded from multiple trips through the scalding dishwashing machine. Her mother wasn’t finicky about food, thank God; imagine if Catherine’s husband Oliver lived here.
Not so difficult to imagine; one day he might be in a home. Not this one, of course; he’d design and build his own, a model facility, classy as all of Oliver’s businesses were. He was an entrepreneur, a so-called idea man who had helped start dozens of businesses in Wichita—restaurants, spas, movie theaters, bars, coffee shops; he found locations, financed the start-ups, trained the personnel. He had an uncanny ability to predict what the next logical need could be in this affluent yet conservative market—and the place to locate it. He’d been succeeding at this calling for decades, by now; Catherine had met him when she needed a job nearly twenty years ago, when his first restaurant/bar had already spawned its offshoots. He was much older than she, a fact her mother had gone out of her way to decry, long ago when Catherine had married, mourning her daughter’s refusal to see Oliver as an antifeminist decision, a throwback desire for male dominance. “He’ll be like another parent!” she’d said, as if any fool could see the doomed predicament of that.
Moreover, he’d had a vasectomy. Her mother’s objections had been thoroughly laid out, an argument built on sound logic, one that would have held up in court, had such decisions been reached that way, were there justice.
Catherine had appreciated her father’s submissive silence on the matter; he understood the vagaries of love, its curious tendency to illogic. And like his daughter, he was accustomed to being the listener, the respondent, to Grace’s opinions.
“Your mother needed a son,” Oliver diagnosed. “Not a pretty daughter.”
Trophy wife, her mother might have said, concerning Oliver’s motives. Her colleague Yasmin Keene would have nodded in agreement.
It was as if her husband had battled her mother for possession of Catherine, and won.
As a result, he refused to visit Green Acres. Catherine held it against him, although he might not realize that. To punish him, she imagined him here, debilitated in a wheelchair, locked inside this building with a bored security guard between himself and freedom, paralyzed, say, so that he couldn’t do anything about the annoying cats who would keep leaping into his lap, shedding on his black clothing. The harpist and her cloying music …
Only accidentally, only because there was so little here to stimulate the imagination, to fill the torpid passage of nursing-home time, did Catherine notice the bundle of mail on the counter, there behind the basket of Splenda, the plastic cup of stirrers, the sticky spill of Cremora, mail for the residents, some of them deceased. She picked through it idly, seeking the odd bill or card that might have her mother’s name on it, the usual gruesome coupons from funeral homes and insurance companies. Instead, she found her own name, her maiden name (her mother had sorely wished she’d kept it). The envelope had been forwa
rded from the old house, where she hadn’t lived since she left for the college dorm in the fall of 1979. It was from a lawyer’s office in Houston, Texas. The postmark on it was weeks in the past.
She took both it and the newspaper back to the lounge.
Her mother received the Times with her working hand, and Yasmin said, “Hmmph.” Catherine decided to take off her coat and hat; as long as Yasmin was going to disapprove anyway, she might as well treat the curmudgeons to a little flash of cleavage and knee, her tame, game striptease. Then she lowered herself to the floor by her mother’s chair, wrapping an arm around her mother’s calf, leaning her cheek to her thigh. It was easier to be affectionate, now, when her mother couldn’t scold her for being sentimental and silly, for a fondness of hugs and kisses and endearments.
Catherine sort of relished the change, to have lost that former mother, the teacher, the talker, the person in charge; that giver of grades, bestower of allowance, withholder of gifts. Noisy and imperious, possessing moral certainty and a confident no-nonsense heart, her mother would bully you into agreement, either bully you or assume that she had when you didn’t disagree. Catherine now savored not having always to listen, to agree, to pretend to agree, to pay attention to what she was pretending or not pretending to agree with. Passivity could be exhausting.
But also, curiously enough, now that she couldn’t know precisely what was going on in her mother’s head, Catherine found herself occasionally interested in knowing.
The television blared as if to make up for the living human diminishment in the room; how would this place seem, minus laugh tracks and commercial jingles, one large grinning orange face after another, and the patriotic orchestral flourishes that announced the news? The serial killer’s comeback and his recent letters to the station were a fascinating unfolding story, a new clue every time the city seemed poised to forget him once more. The broadcaster’s attempt at showing concern would have been comical, had Catherine been watching at home, safe in her husband’s ironic attitude. But here, at Green Acres, surrounded by the dying and their keepers, she could not feel confident disdain.
“Local authorities have no doubt of the authenticity of these souvenirs,” the blond woman was saying in that iconic newscaster voice, so sincerely fascinated, every fourth or fifth syllable dipping down. The serial killer’s most recent overture had been a package left in a park, in it a PJ doll with a bag tied round her head, hands and feet bound with panty hose. Also a driver’s license belonging to one of his victims. “Police were alerted to the package weeks ago,” she declared, this token woman on the team. But it was an ordinary pedestrian, much later, who finally found it. Catherine’s husband was always pointing out that both the killer and the cops were total bumblers.
“This monster has apparently returned to his favorite hunting grounds,” said the woman. She straightened her blank papers on her phony desk, swiveling her earnest glance toward her co-anchor, the token black man on the team.
“Scary stuff, Kelsey,” said he.
Favorite hunting grounds? Last spring, when the killer began his teasing communications after such a long absence, the press had seized upon his so-called “reign of terror.” They meant the years 1974 until 1979. “My adolescence,” Catherine had said to Oliver then. “Age thirteen to eighteen. I’m sure my mother thinks of it as a reign of terror.”
“Adolescent girls are nightmares,” he had agreed, shuddering at the thought. The younger of his two daughters had briefly lived with him and Catherine, during her own reign of terror.
Without warning, Dr. Yasmin Keene abruptly laughed—a startling bark, something you might mistake for a cry for help, or someone suddenly choking. A few of the caregivers glanced over, but Yasmin’s fearsome expression precluded commentary, her walking stick in her gnarly grip like a weapon. Catherine remembered her from many afternoons at the old house, Yasmin and her mother sitting at the kitchen table drinking wine, ranting about their colleagues in, first, the English department, and then, later, in the women’s studies department, which they’d founded. Founded out of passionate rage, their righteous indignation fueling a cause, a partnership, sisterhood, and, as a probable side effect, a friendship.
The wineglasses were always in danger of tipping over.
It had been Yasmin who wanted to watch the evening’s news, not her mother. Dr. Harding wouldn’t want to visit the lurid territory of local gossip. Catherine’s high-minded mother preferred ideas. Now she gripped her beloved Times tighter, in its pages no mention whatsoever of this sick Kansas clown.
Yasmin would have to do the talking for both of them, as her interest in the killer was personal.
“He took one of my classes,” she said to the group. The caregivers turned once more in her direction.
“What did she say?” demanded the feeblest of the curmudgeons. “What did you say?”
“It’s true,” Catherine added, seeing in the staff’s collective bemused expression the usual tolerance of delusional thinking, those wacky stories that the tellers could not be convinced weren’t true—enemies in the basement, taunts coming from the air ducts, furniture mistaken for kin, food for poison, fiction for fact, and vice versa. The kind Haitian, Catherine’s favorite, aimed the remote at the screen to silence a screaming car salesman.
“Her with the stick, what’d she say?” asked the curmudgeon of his comrades.
Yasmin spoke more loudly. “One of his missives, after the seventh incident, was a parody of a folk song from a textbook I assigned for a few semesters.” She leaned back and lowered her chin into her neck as if expecting gasps and questions. None came. Missives, incident, parody, textbook, semesters: this was not the vocabulary of serial killing. Beside her, Catherine’s mother stiffened in her seat, her desire to aid the tale a vibration in Catherine’s ribs.
“It was this crazy old folk song,” Catherine announced reluctantly, “and he imitated it when he told the newspaper about how he stalked this poor woman, and he left a copy at the library, the building right beside Dr. Keene’s office, in the Xerox machine. So he had to be one of her students, you see? The police went through her class lists. She had to have taught the BTK.” Catherine ransacked her mind for any other titillating morsel; the thing was, this particular “victim” had gotten away. The letter was a lament about having missed her. It wasn’t much, really, in the grand scale of things. Yasmin was scowling at her.
“Excuse me?” said the Haitian politely to Dr. Keene, “but what is your teaching specialty?” She gave the word five syllables.
Women’s studies, Catherine almost said. This would be the moment to fashion as an anecdote for her husband’s amusement. Ha! Women’s studies, indeed.
“Folk culture,” Yasmin reported.
“Ah,” said the Haitian, smiling brightly.
“Unmute,” ordered one of the curmudgeons in the Barcaloungers, the one on Yasmin’s other side.
It was the sports announcer’s turn to ply his trade.
Catherine’s letter from Houston was puckered, with a coffee ring on it. She worked open the seal and began reading. The language made no immediate sense to her. Decedent, it said. Pursuant to wishes. If anyone were watching, she would have been horrified to reveal her struggle in comprehending, her panic at her obvious lack of intelligence, her poor heart racing as she labored to wrest logic out of yet another page of information that would not avail itself to her. She could bring home what confounded her to have her older husband rescue her. As her mother had predicted, he would be her parent, protector, translator. He wouldn’t be scornful of her uncertain, flustered response. But by instinct, she had leaned away from her mother’s knee, not wanting her interference. She needed only be patient, read the language over and over again. Her mother valued quickness, and Catherine wasn’t quick.
In the amplified and overheated atmosphere of Green Acres, she applied a methodical attention, slowly taking in what would otherwise simply overwhelm her, send her to the grown-ups to relieve the burden. Here, Ca
therine could take her time. She had another half hour to kill, after all; there were still the meteorologist’s bantering antics to anticipate.
After several readings, there in her pretty dress at her mother’s feet on the lounge linoleum floor, Catherine eventually discerned that she was the named legal guardian of a minor child.
CHAPTER 4
THE FIRST THING Oliver Desplaines did was turn the letter over to his lawyer. “You have a lawyer?” his wife said.
“Of course I have a lawyer.”
“You don’t have to get testy. Why would I know that?”
“You might ask why you wouldn’t know it.”
“No need?” she posited, turning her perplexity into a grinning bit of fun. What Catherine knew and did not know continued to surprise Oliver; women, with the possible exception of his mother-in-law, appeared to undergo some other educational preparation than men—a charming, idiosyncratic, mushy curriculum that privileged people-pleasing over practicality. In the extreme case of his wife, he suspected she’d rejected an interest in the workings of the world in order to thwart her mother, an act of vixenish rebellion, one he’d mostly found quite charming. Mostly, but not wholly.
The document in question had languished at the nursing home after languishing at the post office; his wife might never have received it. Much of her life seemed haphazard that way, unplanned, her calendar of days only sporadically penciled in. She couldn’t have located countries or continents on a globe, yet it was she who remembered the birthdays of managers and the names of their offspring; it was she who came smiling and waving through the doors of their businesses every now and again to remind them that they were a sort of family, Oliver the distant dad with the wallet and spreadsheets and the authority to punish, Catherine the cheerful slightly zaftig mom to whom you could go in tears.
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