The Done Thing

by Tracy Manaster

  I’m sure she meant physically, Clarence. Your mother drifts. She forgets you’ve gone. We don’t remind her. Pam and I can’t see the good of it.

  So Barbra is a grandmother now, imagine. Her grandson doesn’t much look like her. He doesn’t much look like you either. Rigel’s bright but still a few months short of speaking. When he does, he’ll call me Granlida. Blue thought of it; he sees how Grandmother would feel criminal.

  That Claverie Nicky has developed an affinity for Rigel. Every linner now the child comes straight for me. I have the wipes he’ll need before touching the baby. My position in this family is secure, at least until Rigel learns to fend off germs on his own. I wipe Nicky’s hands and caution him to mind the baby’s mush spot. He eyes me so skeptically, a guard dog to be got past en route to the baby, like a level on one of his video games.

  Today, at linner, Rigel discovered his own hair. It’s come in thick, thanks to my side of the family. His fingers laced through curls and, curious, he pulled. He’s new. He couldn’t guess how it would hurt. He’s got quite a little grip. He howled at the pain but was too startled to let go. Pam tried to unsnarl his fingers but Rigel just yanked harder, frightened at the noise and the way it smarted and the worry on her face. You can guess how it went. The more he pulled the more it hurt, the more it hurt the more he screamed, the more he screamed the more Pam fussed, the more Pam fussed the more that poor scared baby pulled and pulled.

  Blue is a hero. Blue is so good with the boy. He took an ice cube from his cup and rubbed it on his son’s hand. Rigel let go, hiccoughing a little. Kath applauded, and Pam’s smile returned. She smoothed her son’s hair and Kath noticed that Rigel had my ears.

  Pamela agreed. “I thought you looked familiar.” She made a big hammy face and tickled her boy under his chin. Then Blue put a hand to my ear and a hand to the baby’s to see for himself and that Nicky who is always hovering shrieked “Butterflies!” Rigel flinched at the ruckus and I saw the roadmap of Blue’s veins and you were there again, reminding me. Every moment with this family stems from your silence and from your sufferance.

  “Butterflies,” Blue echoed and let out a thick chuckle. He lifted his hand away from my ear. I heard laughing all around me and still couldn’t forget that all this I owed to you. Blue smiled toward the warmth he knew was his son and told the boy, “Hear that, Rigel? Granlida’s where you get your butterflies.”

  We got the call just as Kath was bringing her cinnamon dump cake out of the kitchen. Riverview, on Pam’s cell phone. The next of kin should know. Your mother had a fall.

  She was trying to stand alone. Her hip’s smashed up. Eighty-seven years makes for brittle kindling bones. Kath fussed and dithered and would hardly stay quiet enough for Pam to write the information down. Kath’s own mother didn’t live a month after breaking her hip. She just sundowned. That won’t happen to Marjorie, I promised Pam. They’ll make Marjorie a steel ball and socket to match the steel rest of her. We’ll get her at a linner yet.

  I want that to happen, Clarence. Marjorie in her chair, cursing and sputtering, scattering Claveries before her like so many chickens.

  Pamela’s smile was uneasy; I’m not sure she wants that.

  Riverview had her transferred to a hospital on my side of the river. Pamela left the baby at Kath’s and came with me to see Marjorie. They’ll operate in the morning. Marjorie’s doped up for the pain, too groggy to tell she’s been moved but lucid enough to try and hiss her roommate into the hall. “Where’s my baby?” she asks Pam. Pamela’s vague as possible, not sure if she means Rigel, or herself, or even you. “They’re putting brass tacks in the bed,” Marjorie says. “They take your jewelry when you sleep.”

  Pam hushes her. “Nobody would ever do that.” Visiting hours are almost done. Pam tells your mother we’ll both be there after the operation tomorrow, when the doctors wake her up. Your mother’s alarmed; she’s forgotten her own jigsaw hip.

  I have my camera. The Polaroid I used for Meifen. With a baby in the family it’s best to keep one near. I slip into the hall, which is long and clean and unpopulated. Marjorie’s doctors will come for her with a stretcher in the morning. If the pain meds hold, your mother will be too bleary to know what’s happening. They’ll lay her down and she’ll wheel along the hall.

  She might not remember where they’re taking her or why. She might cry out. There is nothing worse than being old and alone and afraid.

  I crane my neck up. Marjorie will be terrified on her back. The doctors will wear masks, as doctors do. She might not hear the soothing things they’ll tell her. I take a picture of the ceiling. The Polaroid spits it out. This much I can bring to Marjorie. At least the fluorescents will be familiar. The snapshot solidifies, a flat bland rectangle of light. I take four steps down the hall and snap another picture. This one shows bare ceiling, textured like a sponge. All the way down the hall I work. I keep the pictures in careful order; Marjorie will roll comfortable through this territory. My neck aches from the tilting. I knead it; I never can work a crick out like Frank used to. Kath tried—unbidden—to unknot me while we waited together endlessly on Rigel. They’d just decided on a cesarean. I shook her off. Kath wouldn’t understand—only you could possibly—how this was the sum of my nightmares, old and new. Pam with an IV, with eyes that couldn’t settle and lips flaking like fish scales, flat and in pain on a gurney, wheeling away.

  She must have gone into the OR down a hall like this. I snap another picture. And you too, wheeled into your last room, even if your light bulbs were caged. I see you, Clarence, and Marjorie, and Pam. The bulbs are unfiltered bright above you, the space between throbbing dark. And you’re sore and afraid, even if you are as strong as anyone. The light is raw. The light hurts. You fight back blinks, your eyes are dry as husks, but you fight. Your pupils constrict, black pinpoints in the blue. Your eyes start to water, there’s no helping that; but as long as it lasts you’ll never shrink, not from this, the light that comes at regular, blessed intervals.

  Acknowledgments

  First thanks goes to my agent, Ayesha Pande, and to teacher extraordinaire, James Hynes, for the longstanding enthusiasm for this book that at times outpaced my own. I can imagine neither The Done Thing nor my writing life without their advocacy and support. Thanks as well to Ben LeRoy and the whole team of fearless fictioneers at Tyrus Books/F+W.

  To Jennifer Vanderbes for a conversation ages back that helped me work out this novel’s essential shape. To V.V. Ganeshananthan, Leslie Parry, and Robert James Hicks for their friendship, advice, good humor, and for regularly asking after my characters as if they were actual people. To Sigrid Brunet for sharing a brain with me and listening to me whine. To Rachel Jagoda Brunette for sharing a brain with me and giving me lots of wine. To Melissa Duclos for reliable wisdom on writing, work/life balance, and wardrobe crises. To all members, active and emeritus, of my adored writing group, The Guttery, with special thanks to current critiquers Mo Daviau, Susan DeFreitas, Jamie Duclos-Yourdon, Cody Luff, Beth Marshea, Lara Messersmith-Glavin, A. Molotkov, and Kip Silverman.

  I know and adore many, many lawyers; any inaccuracies regarding the law and how it operates are either mistakes on my part or fudging for narrative convenience. No lawyers were harmed in the making of this book. Similarly, my father-in-law, Jeff Alifanz, answered my many random questions about teeth. Any dental errors are wholly a function of the author failing to listen properly to the wisdom of her father-in-law; perhaps my mother-in-law, Susie Alifanz, to whom I always pay perfect attention, will put in a good word for me. My mother and father, B.J. and Steve Manaster, are unstinting in their support, as is my sister, Katy Manaster Strand.

  Writing a book means spending a ridiculous amount of time cranky and in my own head and my husband, Marc Alifanz, handles that with remarkable aplomb. Marc, I hope you know that you make the world outside my head wonderful, as do our extraordinary daughters, Elodie and Adeline. Girls, you asked me to include a cheetah and a witch this time around. Please take
a look at page 106, then put the book away. You are both remarkably bright. You astonish me on a daily basis. Nevertheless, this book is not appropriate for second graders.