by Adam Klein
My grandmother is staying on Miami Beach, and I drive the rental car slowly along the strip of pleasantly dilapidated and ostentatiously revamped hotels, noting the perplexing mix of models and retirees. I approach her hotel, looking over the tan, thin legs of the seniors sitting on their folding chairs, reading the paper and watching the waves, exhibiting their white, creamed noses. I try to imagine which one will rise and wave when I pull into the drive.
I remember my father taking me to the beach on one of our many excursions. We’d walk from lobby to lobby, buying postcards, bags of shells, or pouring quarters into the hot molding machines that delivered sky-blue, plastic dolphins. The beach was all Jewish at the time, something we seemed oddly unobservant of, considering our neighbors’ vigilantism and the influential though hardly organized presence of backwater racists in nearby towns. It’s odd to me now that we were unaffected by those attitudes. Perhaps it was a tolerance my grandmother instilled. Or we sensed ourselves similarly marked, not by religious observance, but by the possibility of damnation.
My father stood me before a panel in one of these hotel lobbies. The panel was covered by pink glitter. Mounted to the wall was a chandelier sheared in half, faintly illuminated by sputtering orange, electric flames. He took a picture – blurred and dark – and the arms of the chandelier looked like flower-tipped antlers, and me like something smudged out on the wall. He placed it on the truck dashboard, and in days the sun had bleached the image until it seemed that image was of another time entirely, one we’d never lived through.
I wend my way up the driveway of the small, three-floor hotel with yellow walls and a large veranda. The glass doors read, in frosty white script, THE COLUMBUS. I pull in, take my bags from the backseat, and stand for a moment squinting up at the small screened windows and listening to the surf crashing behind me.
‘Carrie? Is that you?’ A woman has emerged from the glass doors, her voice like a small bell announcing my arrival. ‘Do you need help with those?’
‘That’s all right,’ I say, walking toward her. She embraces me, and I immediately recognize the strength of her grip. She holds me away from her and looks me over. ‘My God,’ she says, ‘we finally meet.’ And I can smell the violet on her, and recognize that smile, which is almost a wince.
‘Do you think we look alike?’ she asks. ‘Of course, you don’t think you look like this old lady, but I can see a resemblance.’ She does not mention the link between us. She is clearly my mother’s mother; these genes are tenacious, struggling toward some sublime articulation.
‘I think we do,’ I say, noting how her eyes search my face more curiously at my acceptance of this bond. She is younger than I imagined, in her sixties. Her youthfulness registers as a surprise because of my mother’s features and what they betrayed, how old she seemed.
‘Well, come on up,’ she says, turning in her silver sandals. Her hair is white with a blue tint to it, and she’s wearing a white T-shirt and shorts. There are a few elderly residents in the lobby, iced tea and egg sandwiches on the glass-topped tables. An older man, much less preserved than she, asks, ‘So, May, is this your granddaughter?’
She introduces me to Herbie, who painstakingly lifts himself from the seat to shake my hand, then immediately sits down. ‘You’re a lovely girl,’ he says, catching his breath. ‘May’s told me a lot about you.’ A lie, I know, but it’s kind of him.
‘I think we’re both looking forward to this,’ I say.
Herbie appears to have stopped listening. May grasps my arm and guides me up the stairs and down a carpeted corridor. At the end of the hall I can see the whitecaps rising and the wild swaying of a palm. Her room is small but clean, the light stretched wall to wall over the swirling blues of the carpet.
‘Have a seat,’ she offers, pulling an orange Eames chair from the kitchen. She sits across from me on the sofa beneath the window.
‘I’ve made us a salad. Are you hungry now?’
‘No, I ate on the plane. Thank you.’
‘Thank you for coming.’ Her face grows more serious, and she glances over to the pictures positioned on a small bookshelf. ‘I suppose I have more questions for you than you have for me,’ she says, turning now to look closely in my eyes. She drops both thin hands on the couch beside her and stands up abruptly. ‘Your mother and I spoke very little.’ She begins walking toward the kitchen, as though she needs an excuse to turn away from me. ‘I don’t really know what kind of a person she was.’
I listen to the spoon on the inside of the pitcher, then hear her pouring a drink into glasses. After a moment I say, ‘She was unhappy, I think.’
She places the iced tea before me, and keeps one glass in her hand. ‘Yes. I gathered that. She probably never told you why she refused to see me.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Too much water under the bridge is how she explained it, nothing more pointed than that.’
‘Well,’ she says, sitting again before me, ‘I tried to get custody of you when you were five years old. I can’t claim to be ignorant of what was happening in that home,’ and I hear in her voice, in the way she articulates that home, the disgust – the judgment – my mother must have reacted to. I hear my mother’s voice too: She cared about you more than she did me, and only because she couldn’t stand what I’d become. She wanted the chance to do it over again, and you would have turned out just the same, maybe worse. Even she couldn’t protect you from yourself.
May’s voice has softened, and she leans toward me as if to gather my attention back. ‘I didn’t ask you here to dwell on these things. I lost my daughter many years ago. It’s just that I,’ her voice falters slightly under the accumulation of this loss, ‘it’s just that I learned to love my daughter at a distance, and I didn’t see the need to continue that with you. I didn’t want you to think you had no family.’
‘My father has made an effort to keep us together,’ I say, looking past her, but not at the ocean. A hardcover book, Christian Science, sits on an end table, a framed picture of my mother beside it.
‘Please don’t think I’m trying to diminish your mother and father in any way, dear. I worried it might be too early to bring this up.’ And she sounds genuinely saddened by where we’ve arrived, so quickly, in our meeting. ‘I’d be perfectly content to put aside all this talk if I could encourage you to smile like you did when I saw you downstairs.’
I feel I owe her this much, and look at her with an ease I find not difficult to settle into now that she’s asked for it.
I say, ‘Let’s not be afraid to talk about these things.’
The woman kicking stones around the driveway doesn’t turn to look in my window. And I’m glad of this, because it’s very late, and she’d holler for me to go to bed, to shut my eyes at least. ‘Shut your eyes,’ she says. ‘I never seem to sleep anymore, even when I take sleeping pills, but all the body needs is a few moments with your eyes closed. Then you’ll feel refreshed and like new.’ She is always outsmarting the body, jump-starting it, fasting it, dulling its responses. My father’s friends continue to pull up, drive out. Though soon it will be light. She walks between their motorcycles, gently running her hand over the leather seats. In the other hand she holds a can of beer. She barely acknowledges my father’s friends, but some approach her and drape an arm around her, or honk and wave after they’ve turned over their engines.
She appears to be looking for something, and burying it with her foot at the same time. She appears to be walking off, and also fearful of going too far. Or perhaps she has arrived at the end; this shifting of gravel is her response to finding another precipice, another potential fall, an unspectacular view. I press my face to the window screen and the mesh itself has a smell, as though it has trapped the scent of the lawn and the hibiscus flowers, and it’s always cooler than the muggy Florida nights. The mesh stays imprinted on my cheek, but fades sooner than the sadness of seeing my mother, aimless and drinking as the sun comes up. I watch for too long, but give up on her before she comes insid
e.
When I leave home I pack my own bag the way my mother once packed for me. I roll everything – the shirts, pants, and windbreaker. She is in the living room, her arm tied off, a sulfur blemish on her knee. She needs this to confront me, to convey the part of her that is still concerned with being a mother, to put up a last fight for the vague companionship she worries she might miss. She needs this shot, or she will be too obsessed with the changes in her body to concentrate on anything outside it. She is more and more preoccupied with the coldness of her blood, the splintering ache in her bones, the anxiety that makes all phenomena outside her body spectral.
Already, I know where I’m going and I have no illusions about it. A choice of disasters, and I’ll choose one of my own making. She lifts herself from the couch and moves slowly toward me. I put my backpack down to embrace her; her fatigue and distress are convincing, as though she walks with lead chains and lifts her arms with lead chains.
‘Don’t go,’ she says simply, clutching me, her body overwhelmed by a paroxysm of sobbing. Floodgates. I imagine her whole world vanished, first my father and now me. I don’t say anything, and she holds me tighter. ‘I need you. Please don’t go.’ I pull myself away from her, lifting her fingers from my arms. Her fingers have an inhuman, bruising strength. She is slumped forward and looking at her feet. She gives up. ‘You have to do what’s right for you,’ she reasons, as though it could ever be right, this decision to leave her here and to step out into the world of decisions, none of which I’m prepared to make.
After dinner, I ask May to see the ashes. I ask simply, as though it were a contract I’d come to sign. She has put the tall, heavy box of my mother’s remains at the foot of her closet. It is especially cumbersome in the context of most things here; all the appointments have a card table, snap-to simplicity. Her dishes are bright plastics and infinitely stackable; even the TV is small enough to sit on the edge of the table. She puts this box down between us, and we both look at it awkwardly for a moment. It is like a gray pillar – Lot’s wife – the result of a compulsive looking back. I remember looking back at the front of our house when I left it, and knowing I would not see my mother come out on the doorstep or appear behind the window. I knew I’d left her in that stillness which had been her aspiration, the stillness of someone who accepts life as an eroding force, nothing more. I reach out for the box with what I imagine to be an appropriate reverence, and pull it closer. May lights a cigarette, which puts me at some ease, and I open the top and see the ash and ground bone fragments in a heavy plastic bag. I consider opening it, but refrain. ‘Where do you want to scatter these?’ I ask, looking up at her.
‘There’s a place she once took me when she first came to Florida. Your father was still in the trucking business, and she was pregnant with you. She had a few dreams, then, and she wanted to let me know that she’d made the right decisions and that her life was going to be a lot smoother. It was out in the Everglades, and I remember it was so hot, and I didn’t want to walk any further. We sat down under a tree there, and we drank some lemonade from a thermos. And I think it was the last time we both believed things might work out. I remember that spot, anyway.’
It is not so much the words, but the distant expression, the hard effort of conjuring this memory, that brings my mother back for a moment. I imagine her in May’s kitchen, plucked briefly from the squalor of her fate and deposited here, living out some last, simple days, no longer reeling from a thousand half-forgotten indignities.
‘I haven’t shed a tear,’ she says suddenly, putting her cigarette out. ‘I’d like to think I’m past the point of being angry with her. I suppose it’s a more general anger now. Angry at the waste of it.’
I don’t try to console her. She feels something, at least. And I would be ashamed to comment on my envying her anger. ‘We’ll go to the Everglades, then,’ I say. I think of what Gina has advised me: let her have the end of her choosing. I, for one, have no faith that my mother will ever rest, or that I’ll remember or forget her sufficiently.
The hotel I’ve chosen is renovated, further up the beach, with deco appointments and a high price tag. I drop my bags in the room’s entryway and open the curtains. The moon has risen pale yellow over the ocean. I can make out its mottled surface, ascendant, scarred. I feel good about paying for this room – to not have a memory of cheaper rooms. I sit on the edge of the bed and listen. Nothing but a faint buzz from the ice machine down the hall. I know how the ice can burn, can be punishment. I look at my palms; they are not the lines of an old soul that I once thought they were. They’re the lines of someone who tried to cheat time, to make it stand still.
There’s fresh fruit in a basket on the desk beside the bed. The hotel room encourages an indulgence I’m unfamiliar with. It urges me to forget. I take my shoes off and walk around the room, which shows itself like a prize, a reprieve I’ve given myself. And it does not matter that other guests who arrive here – two nights from now – will give themselves this same gift; in fact, it’s better to be part of this procession, to enter this place that does not keep its memories. It seems impossible to dream here; these walls guard against the faces of Victor and Janine, or my mother’s face, reconfigured from the ash.
But I do dream – of Hannah. And she is anxiously guiding me around the cottage. It’s snowing outside, and the cottage emits a strange low hum like the ice machine. She is holding my hand and it’s too warm, too warm to be a dream. And she is asking me to hide, and I don’t know if this is a game, but I wake up with my heart racing and a memory of her hot hand clutching mine.
May insists on driving. ‘I tell myself, when this body can’t drive, it’s time to retire it. But I still have some good years left. I’m determined to outlive this car.’ She drives a white Honda. The sun seems to rush the windshield between patches of shade. ‘Turn on the radio if you’d like.’
‘I’d rather we talk,’ I say.
She leans forward, watching the road like a scientist. ‘Well, that’s fine.’
‘How long are you planning to stay on the beach?’
‘I’ve lived here for the past twenty-eight years. I don’t see myself leaving too quick.’
‘You lived this close to us all the time.’ I wonder if she hears the privation in my voice. I feel the fingers of the Indian woman on my braid, and wonder what it would have been like to have been raised on the beach and not some miles away on the canal. These bodies of water seem suddenly indicative; the canal, like something starved, a slow vein.
‘Your mother wouldn’t let me visit or talk with you, so I would sometimes drive by the house and not stop.’ Her words are edged with regret. ‘The lights were always on.’
I wonder if I’d seen her moving down our street, my face pressed to the screen. The world was so much greater than the one-way glass allowed; a world of helpless spectators, suspended interventions. But my mother was probably right; I would have turned out just the same. I would have found this old woman’s kindness too sad, the compulsion to look back too strong. And I recognize now how any vestige of normalcy, of adjustment, had to be forfeited by the woman beside me; how driving by her daughter’s home at night is nothing she’d tell Herbie or the other residents of her hotel. She would have had her secrets too – her adaptations – and I would have found it too difficult to pretend these did not exist. I would have been susceptible to them. Now I recognize how they give her profile strength; I smile at her, but she’s watching the traffic.
‘I moved here to be with her and your father. I got a job on the beach as a waitress and decided to live there. “When I moved into the Columbus, they hired me to do the cooking. I’ve known some of those residents over twenty years. That’s how I got through. I made them my family. I still cook for them, know every one of their favorite desserts.’
We drive down 8th Street, remarkably transformed into Little Havana, its Cuban groceries and fruit stands crowding the streets. I remember nothing but trees here, the sound of my father’s truck a
s we drove – the rattletrap rhythms I could feel in my teeth – when there were only a few barbershops and dime stores. And I remember the old cowboy Rudi walking his horse alongside the road, and how he’d wave to us. And once we’d stopped, and that horse stuck his head through my opened window. My father poured a packet of sugar in my hand, grasped it, and held it under the horse’s tongue. I was terrified, but he and Rudi were laughing at me.
‘All of this has changed,’ she says, aware of my silence. ‘Your mother sold the house to pay for medical bills. It would probably have some real value now. She moved in with a friend of hers. I’m not sure where they were staying. When I last saw her, she was in the hospital. I would have asked her to live here with me but she couldn’t leave; the strokes made it impossible.’ And now I see the houses of Sweetwater through the trees, multiplied like a real neighborhood and not just like abandoned lots, a stragglers’ community. Still, the homes seem depressed with their clotheslines and junk cars, though the streets are newly paved.
We start to make our way into the Everglades, its dense mangroves bleeding into marsh water, still and thick with light-green, almost luminous algae. There are flocks of birds wheeling overhead, and the air is heavy and damp. We pull up behind a bus full of children on a science expedition. A group of kids stand outside the bus before a man with a brimmed hat and a bullhorn. He is calling their attention to a snail in his palm. ‘You’ll see lots of these, mostly on leaves,’ he says.
May is holding the box of ashes in front of her. She walks briskly ahead of me, and I notice the children watching us, their attention drawn from the man with the snail. These are my mother’s ashes, I imagine telling them from his bullhorn. That’s today’s lesson. The dead become something else, something science doesn’t reveal to us.
