A Good Distance

by Sarah Willis

  Betsy and Todd talk across me about spring bulbs. I’m content to just sit and listen to the sounds of their voices. I want to fit into this family around the table, I just don’t want to talk, or tell any more stories.

  While we eat, Peter shares funny anecdotes about our childhood and Betsy nods, adding a detail here and there. Jazz giggles when he describes the time my father entered us into a singing contest. We must have been all under five years old, and I don’t know how Peter remembers a single thing about it because I’m older than he is, and I don’t. He starts singing “Row, row, row your boat,” out of tune, imitating the voice of a four-year-old child, and even the people sitting next to us laugh. They’re drinking margaritas, too.

  Betsy leans over and talks to me quietly. “It was good of you to take Mother in for a while. Thanks. I think the home is just beautiful. I didn’t expect that.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “I’m glad I could take care of her for a little while, anyway.”

  “Your daughter’s beautiful.”

  I smile. “Thanks. I think so, too.” I wait a minute, then since she doesn’t say anything else, I do. “I hope we can start getting together. How about Christmas this year, at my house? I’d love to see your boys. And we can all visit Mother.”

  “Yes. Let’s do that,” Betsy says, as if she means it. “Hey, Peter, how about Christmas here this year? Do you think you can make it?”

  “Think so,” he says. “I’ll have to ask Emily.”

  “You could stay at my house,” I say. Both Jazz and Todd turn and stare at me.

  “Yeah, we’ll make it work,” Todd says.

  After dinner we divvy up the times to visit Mother tomorrow so there will always be someone there. Peter and Betsy are staying in a hotel, and will be visiting friends tomorrow when they’re not at the nursing home. They won’t be coming back to the house, just the home.

  Outside the restaurant we hug goodbye, even though we’ll see each other tomorrow.

  When we go to bed, Todd holds me while I cry a little. “It’s a really nice place,” I say. “She’ll like it.”

  On Monday, Shelly welcomes me back with a big hug. I have been hugged by so many people in the last few days that I feel well hugged, like being well fed, or well rested.

  Shelly shows me what’s been going on, what I need to work on right away, what can wait. Only when she leaves the room do I readjust the chair. I spend lunch in the bathroom, crying on a toilet.

  After work I go directly to the nursing home. As I walk in the front doors, I stop and look around at the beautiful atrium, the hundreds of plants, the chairs that are so inviting. There are clusters of people, each with an old person in the center.

  My mother’s door is open. She’s sitting in a chair, watching the news with the sound off.

  On the bureau are the photos I brought, and I look at them. Jazz is the only granddaughter. The one to carry on the female genes. I’m going to have to talk her out of the stunt double idea.

  “Hello, Mother.” No more of this Mrs. Morgan stuff. I am her daughter. So be it.

  She nods, puts a finger to her lips, nods at the TV. I don’t know if she means I should be quiet so she can hear the TV, or if she means I should be quiet, like the TV.

  “Hello,” I whisper. “How are you?”

  She rolls her eyes and shrugs.

  “Did you like your dinner tonight?”

  “No.”

  She doesn’t talk much, but give her a reason to say no, and she will.

  “Too bland?”

  “No.”

  “Too spicy?”

  She shrugs.

  “Miss my cooking?”

  She shrugs, missing a good opportunity to say no. I smile.

  “Tomorrow I’ll bring cookies. And Sunday, Todd and I are going to come and pick you up, bring you to my house for dinner. Would you like that?”

  “They don’t go there,” she says.

  “Where? Who doesn’t go?”

  “Them.”

  “Who? Go where?”

  “Oh, you know!”

  I don’t, but I have a feeling this could go on forever. “Okay,” I say.

  “Fine!” she says. “Good.”

  I tell her about going back to work, and she smiles. She always liked working. After an hour of this, I ask her if she’d like me to help her get ready for bed.

  “No. They do.”

  “But I could,” I say.

  “Don’t bother.”

  “It’s no bother. I’d be happy to.”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nods, a big, solid nod, and then says, “Oh!” clutching her chest. The nod must have hurt her bruised ribs. Good thing she doesn’t agree with me much.

  “Can I help you do anything before I go?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then, goodbye. I’ll be back tomorrow.” I see a bit of relief in her eyes. I think it’s because I’ll be back tomorrow, not because I’m leaving.

  “Love you,” I say. And I mean it.

  At least twice a week Jazz or Todd comes with me. We take her out of the building for walks and car rides, trips to the mall, home for dinner on Sundays, but as time passes, she starts to insist on staying there, not leaving. She loses more words, grows more confused. She needs the comfort of a familiar room. One day I get her coat on and we walk outside. In less than a minute she wants to go back in. It is the last time she ever wears her coat.

  Peter’s family can’t come for Christmas. He invites us there, but we decline. Betsy has a vacation coming up in March, and the whole family is going to the Bahamas, so they can’t afford to fly in for Christmas. Still, she comes in for two days in January and stays with us. It’s both uncomfortable and a great comfort that she comes. Someday we’ll talk about the bad stuff. For now, we talk about kids and nursing homes.

  A little more than a year after she moves into the nursing home, my mother stops talking altogether. She and Jazz play cards but without any rules I can see. Jazz doesn’t seem to mind at all. I’ve smelled pot on her clothes twice now. I’m waiting for the third time to confront her, only because I don’t know how to confront her on this. I can vividly remember telling my mother that she was nuts when she said that she smelled marijuana on my clothes. “Yeah? How do you know?” I said, then, “It’s just my perfume, Mother,” then, “My friends smoke cigarettes, that’s all you smell.” Then, “Prove it.” I’m not ready to prove it.

  The comfort of the atrium only depresses me now, and green plants remind me of old age. My mother shrinks, getting smaller. Four people have died whose names I memorized, and their names stay with me. I bring homemade cookies to the floor twice a month, and can’t eat them, can’t stand the smell of cookies. Once, I don’t visit my mother for three days in a row.

  One day, when I pick Jazz up from Turtle’s, I smell pot on her again. I tell Todd, and he thinks this is pretty serious. We have a family talk and Jazz says she does smoke sometimes, but not much. We make rules about grades, behavior, and driving. Todd thinks we’ve had a really good talk, and bets she’ll stop now.

  Jazz applies to four colleges, and Todd offers to go along with her when she visits them. They drive off in his truck discussing which is the best route to take and who gets to play their disc first. She’s accepted by all four, and chooses Miami of Ohio. Now she’s decided to be a movie director.

  My daughter goes off to college, driving a used Honda we buy her as a gift. She says we can’t come with her to help her move in. “You’ll just cry, Mom,” she says, and that makes me cry. I’m becoming a sap in my old age. I clean her room after she leaves, washing the woodwork, polishing the bureaus and bookshelves, making the bed. I like the way it looks for about two days, and then it bothers me so much I close her door and pretend it’s a mess.

  I try, once again, to like going for rides on the motorcycle, but I still hate it. When Todd rides off alone, I play my discs loudly and pretend I’m having fun in the house all
by myself.

  Two and a half years after we moved my mother into the nursing home, she dies of an aneurism in the middle of the night.

  Jazz comes home from Miami University for her nana’s funeral.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Everyone stands on one side of the coffin so the wind’s at their backs, but it still feels cold and Jazz shivers. She’s surprised people can think about things like which side of the coffin to stand on so the wind is at their backs when someone is dead right in front of them. If it were her own mom, she’d be crying so hard she couldn’t think at all.

  They don’t even know if any of Nana’s brothers or sisters are alive, but her mom thinks they’re not, since they were so much older. Her mom says that the one sister Nana did talk to died of lung cancer years ago. Jazz figures she must have a lot of relatives somewhere because they’re Catholic and probably had big families, but she wouldn’t know them if she bumped into them on the street. She’s going to try make a family tree. They have places on the Web that’ll help you. She wishes she’d asked Nana about her family before she died. She’d better start asking her mom about stuff now.

  Aunt Betsy and Uncle Peter have come, with Uncle Jasper and Aunt Emily, but only one cousin, Lenny, who’s seventeen and a nerd. All her other cousins couldn’t come because they had tests or important jobs. Jazz wants to write them e-mails and get in touch, get their help in this family-tree thing. Maybe they could get together sometime when someone isn’t dead.

  She doesn’t mean to be putting people down, especially at a funeral, but, God, it’s not like they’ve got a whole lot of grand-parents they can just pick and choose which funeral they can get to. She didn’t even like Nana much, till recently, but she knows she has to be here. It’s just the right thing to do.

  Uncle Peter thinks they should all say something, in no special order, just as it comes to them, but no one wants to start. They’ve been standing here quietly staring at the casket, and it’s giving her the willies. Todd clears his throat.

  “You know, I didn’t know Rose all that well. I met her too late in life—she wasn’t really herself most of the time. She seemed like a pretty tough lady, to me. In a good way, I mean. I really would like to hear what you guys have to say.” Todd looks embarrassed now, and looks down at the ground. Jazz gives him a little bump with her elbow and smiles at him. She’s proud he spoke up. He may look pretty stupid in a suit, but he’s okay.

  Todd built Jazz a cabinet for her dorm room, to hold her stereo system in the small space between her bed and the wall. He rides down on his bike sometimes, just to bring her some of her mom’s cookies, and even went and visited Uncle Peter last fall, so they could go climb a little mountain. Uncle Peter sent photos afterward, with a letter saying, Here’s pictures of the little mountain we climbed, let me know when you’re ready for something bigger. But this summer Jazz, Todd, and her mom are going to drive to San Francisco to meet Hunter Phillips. Her mom’s been saving all her vacation time so they can go for a whole month. It was real easy to find him. He still lives in San Francisco, and works as the marketing director for Haight Ashbury Publications. Her mom wrote him a letter and he wrote right back, and then Jazz wrote him and sent him a photo, and he sent a photo back. It’s a picture of him sitting on the limb of a tree, and he’s got a ponytail, which Jazz usually doesn’t like on guys, but it looks all right on him, even though he’s kind of old. It’s really hard to believe he’s her dad. She calls him Hunter, not Dad, but in her head, sometimes she thinks the word Dad. He doesn’t have any other kids. They e-mail each other a lot. Hunter said he’d come see her if Jazz wanted him to, but she kept putting it off. It was Todd’s idea they go meet him this summer, and he made all the plans. He says Jazz needs to see him just once, in case she loses her chance. They leave in three weeks, just a couple days after Jazz gets back home from Miami U. for summer break.

  Oh, my God, for a minute she almost forgot she was standing in front of a dead person. She keeps spacing out like this, every time she thinks about meeting her dad. Aunt Betsy’s talking so softly Jazz can hardly hear her with all the wind. She says something about when she was a kid and they went to an amusement park and Nana spent an hour on the carousel. But Aunt Betsy doesn’t finish the story because she’s crying too much. Jazz doesn’t even know if that was the end of the story. Uncle Jasper puts his arm around Aunt Betsy and says, “Well, we all loved her. Our whole family did.” It’s kind of pitiful, and gets Lenny off the hook. Jazz thinks that she’ll speak up now, but Uncle Peter starts talking first.

  “When I was just three years old,” he says, “Mother brought home these three enormous pumpkins for Halloween. Each one had to be at least thirty pounds. They were the biggest pumpkins in the whole wide world. Dad had to carry them in from the car. She carved them out and put them on our front porch. She said it was too hard to take all of us trick-or-treating by herself since Dad would be at the theatre, so we’d just have to stay home and hand out candy. She put each one of us in a pumpkin and gave us a basket of candy. We must have looked like idiots. Betsy fell asleep in hers.”

  There’s silence for a minute, while everyone takes this in. Jazz doesn’t believe her uncle really remembers that. She can’t remember anything from when she was three, and she’s a lot closer to that age than he is. The first thing she remembers, she thinks, is when she was four and was at some birthday party and spilled juice all over her white dress, and she cried until her mom came and got her. When they got home, her mom poured juice on her own pants, just to show that it wasn’t so bad, and then they took a bath together. Jazz wonders if it’s the story she’ll tell when her mom dies. It’s a really sad thought, but you can’t help thinking stuff like that at the cemetery, while your nana’s in a coffin a few feet away.

  Jazz thinks she’ll talk now, she really wants to get this over with, but Uncle Peter starts again. “Then, when I was seven,” he says, and she rolls her eyes, right there in the cemetery. Uncle Peter could go on for a long time if he’s going to tell stories starting when he was three and seven. But he only tells two more stories, and then he starts to cry, which gets Aunt Betsy crying louder. Jazz’s mom’s not crying at all. Her eyes are wet and red, but she isn’t sobbing or making noises. When Uncle Peter’s done, he turns to his wife, as if it’s her turn. Jazz thought they were just supposed to speak up.

  Aunt Emily says she knows Rose wasn’t very religious in her later years, but she’d like to say a little prayer for her anyway. It’s a short prayer, and both she and Uncle Peter say amen. So does Aunt Betsy and her family. Todd, her mom, and Jazz are quiet, although Jazz says amen in her head, just in case.

  Finally Jazz steps forward. Every one looks at her. “I’m really sorry my nana died, and I want to say something about her.” She’s been thinking about what to say ever since last night when Uncle Peter made his announcement that they should all share a memory at her grave.

  “I remember when my mom and Nana and I went to the Natural History Museum.” She stops for a second. It isn’t easy to talk out loud in front of all these people, which isn’t all that many people really, but they’re all staring at her. She decides to make her story shorter than she’d planned. “I got scared when we went into the room with the dinosaurs, and I was holding my mom’s hand and didn’t want to go in. Nana asked me what I was scared of, and I pointed to a big dinosaur with an open mouth full of sharp teeth. She said, ‘You think he might hurt you?’ and then she went right over to the dinosaur and made a fist and waved it in the dinosaur’s face and said, ‘Okay, you big bag of bones. Put ’em up. Come on, loose lips. Lets see what you can do.’ Then she stuck out her tongue at the dinosaur and made that noise with her tongue. You know.” Jazz is not going to make that noise at a cemetery, but they know what she means. “She shook her head and turned to me and said, ‘Well, I think he’s dead all right, or just a big sissy. Come on.’”

  Everyone smiles at her, but telling it didn’t make her as happy as thinking about it. Sh
e steps back from the grave.

  Now it’s her mom’s turn to say something.

  Todd holds my hand, keeping me here, in place, at the end of my mother’s lifetime and the beginning of her existence as a memory. And once again there is no order to her life. She moves between us as a young mother, a widow, a grandmother, an in-law. I know she will come back to me in whispers and tugs forever.

  I have my mother’s eyes. They’re sea-green, and slant down at the end, not up, as I would like. I have her toughness, her bone structure, her small feet, and some of her furniture. I have a daughter, who is my mother’s grandchild.

  Jazz’s words have triggered a memory I had forgotten. The few times we came to Cleveland when I was a kid, my mother would take Peter, Betsy, and me to the museums. She would read the plaques to us in a reverent tone, and I thought the information fine and glorious, worthy of the shiny brass stands. I trusted those words.

  The Natural History Museum was my favorite. The dinosaurs stood before us, enormous, ugly, yet graceful. Behind them were drawings of the world millions of years ago, the dry, flat tundra, the spiky green ferns, the endless blue sky. I was so used to sets and backdrops that part of me believed these scenes were really a rehearsal, that given months of practice, the dinosaurs would put on their skins and the play would begin. A backward way of looking at the dinosaurs invaded me; I thought they were something yet to come, not something long dead. I never mentioned this to my mother, who would have patiently explained how silly it was. I did tell my father, who said he knew just what I meant.

  I don’t remember our coaxing Jazz into the dinosaur room when she was little, but what I do remember about that day was the new plaque in front of a dinosaur that I had visited with my mother when I was little. It said the creature wasn’t a brontosaurus at all. The paleontologists had made a mistake. They had mixed two dinosaurs together and made one that had never existed at all. It was part apatosaurus, part camarasaurus, and part plaster. They were going to dismantle it sometime in the near future. I thought they were brave to admit their mistake. Who would know?