by MB Caschetta
Violet patted her arm. “Claro, querida.” Of course.
Ricardo sat back, watching the Germans at the end of the table. They now seemed to be singing English nursery rhymes.
Violet hummed along. After traveling so long with a group even the most unpredictable behavior had come to feel expected. At that moment anything seemed possible: She might return to the parador with the fountain out front in Barcelona and whisper to Ricardo’s sleeping profile, “I’ll never see that wonderful man again.”
Or you.
Wonderful you.
At noon, on their last day in Spain, the bull ring at Les Arenes was crowded with men in rolled-up shirtsleeves, abandoning their wives and children to the higher seats en el sombre, the shade, by climbing down the stone steps to the bull pens for a closer look. Even Violet seemed slightly drunk with excitement. She sat in front of Ricardo, below him for once. He enjoyed the top of her head, the clasp of a pearl necklace, her bare shoulders. She wore a large-brimmed sombrero.
“Last day blues?” he asked her.
Violet nodded. “Back to school next week.”
The night before, they’d all thrown themselves an impromptu farewell party, joking about the trouble they might get into without Mercedes on Saturday, her day off. Even the Germans were subdued, cowed by the heat and chafing against the quiet.
“I know I look ridiculous,” Violet said, indicating her hat.
“You look pretty,” he said.
When the bull finally appeared—furious and muscular, kicking up orange dust and huffing through large black nostrils—Ricardo watched, hypnotized, from his perch safely high up near the stone coliseum’s pinnacle. The day was suffused with colors, peanut shells, the smells of urine and cerveza. He felt hypnotized by the beauty of el toro, the lusty tone of his hide, the sheen of his muscles. When the horse-backed picadores appeared in full uniform, Violet leaned her whole body back against Ricardo’s knees.
The sensation of her spine against his shin was so exciting it took a full minute for him to realize what was happening. Violet had fainted.
As she slipped to the hot stone at their feet, Ricardo grabbed under each of her arms, but before he could lift her, Gustav—a big, blonde, oafish German—took over and was carrying her, groggy and silent, to the bus.
Ricardo trailed behind, holding Violet’s hat.
Once she was laid out flat on the bus’s back seat, Ricardo insisted Gustav return to the fight. Splashing water from a cooler on Violet’s forehead, he fanned her with a program. He opened the button of her collar, imagining what it might be like to touch her.
“Water,” she said.
He hovered, trying to shake off his shame at the desire he’d felt. “Don’t get up.”
Violet was looking at him, her eyes working to focus. He leaned down and kissed her. She came to life, opening her mouth to deepen the kiss, then pushed him away.
“How humiliating,” she said.
Once Violet had recovered, the group gathered for some final sightseeing in Las Ramblas, the old part of town. Ricardo watched the crowds in the market, losing track of the others. He’d read once that Mario Vargas Llosa said no other city in the world was as snobbish as Barcelona, except Milan, but when he looked into the Spaniards’ eyes, he found the glancing reflection of his dead mother staring back.
At dinner, the Germans replayed the bullfight for Violet, making finger horns and dancing around the table as the mariachi serenaded. “You missed the best part!” Gustav said, pretending to be a bull about to meet the sword.
Violet protested slightly.
Heading to the bus that would take them the short distance to the hotel for their final night, Violet took Ricardo’s arm. As they approached a mailbox, Ricardo searched his bag for the postcards he’d composed the night before: the stone statue for Patty and Libby; the severed ears of defeated bulls addressed to New York City.
“For my father,” he said, showing them to Violet.
The letter he’d written about art and life and his secret desires was safely tucked in the pocket of his linen jacket.
As the bus rode toward the parador for the last time, Ricardo waited for another of Violet’s confessions. “What are you thinking?”
She turned toward him. “Oh, about Edward.”
The Germans were singing a patriotic song. Ricardo was about to speak when she placed a hand on his arm.
“It wasn’t the thought of the blood that made me faint,” she said.
He felt the warmth of her skin through his shirt, and closed his eyes. He fingered the letter to his father. “What then?”
The bus lurched forward, bucking slightly against ancient cobblestones.
“It was their lives,” Violet said, “their sad, caged lives.”
Ricardo suddenly saw the arc of his own oncoming life, the paintings he’d make, the women who’d adore him, and the beautiful men he would love.
He reached out into the dark for Violet’s hand.
What’s
not
my fault?
Lily and Janet sat on the bed, memorizing what they could of Mary-Kay, who, after so many surgeries and treatments and relapses, was now dying.
She seemed nothing at all like the woman who’d given them life.
Time threaded apart, quick yet absurdly slow. Weeks of the same slack jaw, same fever, no movement whatsoever; so that even hoping for something—progress in either direction—seemed cruel.
They might as well still have been little girls, perched on the bed, waiting for their mother to wake and make them breakfast or take them swimming. They sat on the bottom half of a pilly hospice blanket.
They were all grown up, but presiding over their mother’s dying body, it didn’t feel that way.
“What about a priest?” Lily finally said. “Maybe Mother would want one?”
“Mrs. Robinson,” Janet said loudly into her mother’s ear. “Do you want a priest?”
It took most of Mary-Kay’s energy to reach the surface of consciousness, but she managed to wave off the suggestion. She wanted nothing of religion. Not any more.
She made the gesture again, bony arm barely lifting off the bed, fingers flicked decisively and suspended in air.
How lovely. Communication with her daughters should always have been so clear, so well executed.
“Take it easy, Mrs. Robinson,” Janet said, still very loud. “It’s not your fault.”
Mary-Kay hadn’t spoken for days. The sound of her voice, strained and sickly, came as a surprise. “Well, of course it’s not.”
Janet touched her sister’s arm, as if in the act of reaching out for their mother she’d somehow missed the mark. “It’s okay. We’re here.”
“Yes, here,” Mary-Kay said or maybe thought. “But it’s not going very well, is it?”
Lily jumped to her feet. “Should we call for the doctor?”
These revivals were alarming. They’d been warned that the process of dying was anything but linear, and still it seemed all wrong.
Some people get very lucid just before they go, Dr. Alberts had said.
Janet hated his euphemisms: just before they go.
Go where?
Lily, by contrast, hated everything but these comforting bits of wisdom from the doctors. There was so much to hate over these past several years: the slow decline, the hushed conversations, the way her mother’s wardrobe underwent a metamorphosis. Bulky gold amulets, jaunty knit slack suits—usually navy blue or lime green—and something like soft leather hiking boots.
Who but their mother would treat cancer as an excuse for a makeover?
She had acted exactly as if hysterectomies and colostomies and radiation were minor inconveniences. Even as recently as the last recurrence, she insisted on being dropped off at her chemotherapy treatments.
“Wait in the car,” she said, as if she were running into the deli to get a loaf of bread. “It’ll just take a few minutes.”
Now, Mary-Kay flapped her ey
es at the ceiling.
“What should we do?” Lily looked around, frightened. She was about to enter her second trimester with twins; it had taken her so many years and so much money to finally achieve a viable pregnancy that even the smallest thing exhausted her.
“It’s just a weird little burst of energy,” Janet said.
Mary-Kay’s voice was like fine grade sandpaper. “Why is everyone yelling?”
“Extremes,” Janet said in a normal voice. “It’s what we Robinsons have come to.”
Later, when they’d all gone home for the night, Mary-Kay thought it over. Her family came often, stayed late, said little.
And here it was, unexpectedly, a moment alone.
“Wait—what’s not my fault?” she said aloud.
She was thinking about the fact that once she had loved another man as much as, if not more than, she loved Richard.
The night nurse sighed deeply and took Mary-Kay’s temperature. “None of it is your fault, dear. Really, not a thing.”
Lily didn’t want the babies’ names to rhyme.
“Of course not, sweetheart,” her father said. He was taking her to an emergency obstetrician appointment. “Why would you?”
Outside the weather was mild, Indian summer. Good for business, Lily’s husband always said.
Paul LeChance Construction did its best work in dry weather.
Paul wanted to work as much as possible, so he could be around when the twins were born. Lily felt bad about asking her father to take her, especially now that her mother’s cancer had recurred. But there was bleeding, and the appointment was early in the day.
“A couple of stitches to the cervix,” the obstetrician had said cheerfully, “and those babies will stay right in place!”
Lily’s father seemed pale and tired, seated across from the model of matching fetuses.
In the car, Lily said, “Daddy, they’re going to sew me up like a sack of flour.”
He patted her hand. “Don’t worry, princess. Everything will be fine.”
Lily could feel the babies moving under her ribs like heartburn wearing tennis shoes. She missed being thin and light on her feet. Missed her elastic figure and the appearance of youth, though she was thirty-seven and beginning to wrinkle around the eyes. She missed spin class and making love with Paul on Saturday morning, because now she was too nervous. Her skin felt tight as football leather: If you touch me I’ll pop. It was her new favorite phrase, even when no one was around.
Her father turned expertly against traffic into the hospital lot. He pulled into a parking spot several yards from the entrance. “Put the seat back and lie flat. I just want to check on your mother and then I’ll take you home.”
“I’m starving,” Lily said.
“Cafeteria?” her father said. “One toasted cheese and chocolate shake coming up!”
Lily watched her father cross the neat black pavement, heading toward Emergency, a short cut Janet had discovered after their mother’s third surgery, when they sewed her back up without even attempting to remove any tumors. When Lily’s father was a safe distance, Lily took out her Marlboro Lights and a can of Lysol. It was a soft day late in September, unusually pleasant. The parking lot was surprisingly busy.
Opening the car door wide, Lily lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. On the ninth floor of the mammoth brick building, her mother was recovering from her final surgery. They would give her radiation to shrink the tumors and make her feel as comfortable as possible. This had given her sister a reason to pull herself together and Janet and their mother another excuse to gang up on Lily. Not to mention the fact that her dying all but obliterated the otherwise happy news of the twins. Her mother had always wanted grandbabies.
Lily always got the short end of the stick. When their mother carried on like a teenager with the junior high school principal, she was employed to act as cover, at the tender age of twelve, bribed with secret ice-cream sundaes and long afternoons at the movie or mall. The subterfuge turned Lily bitter at an early age. When things went downhill with Principal Howe, and their mother was secretly broken-hearted, she comforted her mother and kept it all under wraps, so Daddy wouldn’t find out.
Janet had gotten to escape the entire mess by being a moody teenager, a normal high school girl with love interests of her own and friends who drove cars that could take her away.
Even when they were grown, when Janet suffered from nervous exhaustion after her divorce, sleeping on Mother’s sofa and heading straight for a breakdown, who suggested she see a shrink, someone unrelated entirely to Janet’s ex, a man she married after years of seeing him as an analyst? When Janet ran around the house, straightening the bedspreads and aligning the fringe on Mother’s throw rugs, did Lily ever say I told you so? No, she kindly suggested medication. But did they ever offer her constructive criticism or a helping hand?
And now her mother’s death was exactly coinciding with Lily’s first happy moment: her long-awaited double miracles.
She really couldn’t catch a break.
Pregnancy was worse than expected. The stress and gas made Lily feel like drinking again. Not real drinking, like when she was in college and used to wake up with naked people she didn’t even know: cab drivers, professors, and once a woman from town. And not like after college, when she used to drive the car to Connecticut and wake up in jail. This was different; she longed for the pleasure of a lovely red wine, something mellow to calm the nerves. A glass of merlot would be good. She’d heard the Australians had perfected the art sometime after she’d gotten sober. Paul would worry, so she wouldn’t tell him—they’d met in AA, a fact Lily downplayed around her family. Imagining the conversation:
“Lily and Paul go to AA together, Richard.” Her mother, all whispery and conspiratorial. “You know, Alcoholics Anonymous.”
“I’ll drink to that!” Her father, lifting his scotch glass cheerfully.
Her mother, bemused: “Alcoholics don’t have a sense of humor, darling. Let’s just keep your little joke entrez nous.”
Lily pictured her mother conjuring up all sorts of terrible images: a smoky little circle of greasy alcoholics in the basement of the local church, confession about a lousy childhood, a lousy life. Her mother had managed to twist Lily’s teenage drinking into an accusation, like proof of early neglect or emotional abuse. Anyway, she wasn’t really going to drink, and no one knew about the smoking.
Paul wanted to make it legal: “I think the twins should have parents who are married.”
The generic reference to their babies as “the twins” irked her. “Loving parents are all any human being needs.”
Lily stepped outside the car, although the doctor had told her not to stand unless necessary. “They might just fall right out of there,” the nurse had joked in a way Lily didn’t appreciate. She stubbed out her cigarette on her father’s tire, then flicked the nub across a Subaru wagon to her left, not seeing the driver approaching carrying a purse the size of a suitcase.
“Oh sorry,” Lily said.
The woman gave her a dirty look.
“What, you’ve never seen somebody expecting twins?” She sprayed Lysol near her father’s car.
The woman, who was small and was younger than Lily, trembled. “It’s cruel, you know. Some people would give anything.”
Some people. Lily slammed the car door, feeling guilty.
When Mary-Kay woke it was dark.
Richard was sitting by the bed, reading aloud from the paper.
Leave it to Richard to think of the New York Times at a moment like this, yet as she floated in and out of wars and crimes, political scandals—bridal announcements!—she was happy to know there were people around to carry on.
It was a bit of a surprise that she kept wondering about God.
But Mary Kay hadn’t wanted God while giving birth to her girls or going through the battering ram of everyday life. She wouldn’t need him now. And who was to say who or what God was? Maybe she was God. Or Gerald Howe, princip
al at Westchester Middle School. Maybe God was the only man she’d ever desired with every inch of her maturing body.
Making love on the living room sofa, they were caught in the act one afternoon by Lily, at the time a mere child disguised as a budding teenager. Maybe God was the look of awe and disgust on her face.
Or the pain Mary-Kay felt when Gerald broke things off.
Or maybe God is Richard, the patience and loyalty of a humble man. Mary-Kay listened to him drone on about the stock market. The delicate shape of his skull showed through his thinning hair; his nostril hairs stirred as he dozed off at the end of a paragraph on Internet companies. His ears protruded comically, wrinkling slightly at the lobe. She knew those ears better than she knew herself. Maybe God was that exact feeling of knowing.
As Mary-Kay tried to fend off the undertow of morphine, a memory floated up: a phone message playing quietly, somewhere after her second round of chemo, Lily’s voice: Not your little girl anymore, Daddy.
“Hell of a way to announce the future,” Mary-Kay had said, standing by the answering machine.
“She’s eloping?” Richard looked stunned. He replayed the message twice more. Lily was running off to marry Paul. No one in the family was invited.
In those days Mary-Kay could clock the hours before she started feeling ill; she still had a little more time. “I suppose a private affair is better in her condition.”
“We’re really not invited?” Richard paced the room, mulling the insult, then sighed. “At least we’ll save a bundle.”
Mary-Kay patted his back. “That’s the spirit, dear.”
Now, she lay in a hospital bed dreaming of Gerald Howe, who’d broken things off so completely twenty-five years ago that it still took her breath away to call up the pain he had caused her. She remembered their last phone conversation: Darling, did you really think we could go on like this forever?
Yes, she’d said. Why not? No one ever has to know.
Lying did not come easily to him; he’d taken a vow. And so had she. Didn’t they both have children and marriages to protect?