There Your Heart Lies

by Mary Gordon

  Two days later, the pulmonologist’s office calls and makes an appointment for the same afternoon.

  “That can’t be good,” Amelia says to Helga.

  “We don’t know yet. Don’t talk like that to your grandmother.”

  But when Meme comes out of the doctor’s office, Amelia and Helga can see that the news is not good.

  “The doctor wants to see you,” she says to them.

  The doctor tells them that Marian will have to be checked into the hospital for a lung biopsy. “The biopsy will be tomorrow,” he says.

  —

  Marian asks Amelia to pack her suitcase. “For some reason, I find the prospect too fatiguing.”

  She directs Amelia to the suitcase underneath her bed: a small, anachronistic-looking rectangle of navy-blue leather with a border of white. At her grandmother’s direction, Amelia packs a blue cotton nightgown and a pair of white cotton socks. She’s embarrassed to be handling her grandmother’s underpants, whose plainness saddens her: large, androgynous, white, they could belong to anyone before or past the age of sexual allure. But what did she expect? Satin bikinis? A black lace thong? She hates thinking about her grandmother in this way.

  —

  They keep Marian overnight in the hospital, and in the morning the doctor phones Amelia to set up a meeting immediately after her discharge.

  He uses the word he has to use. Cancer. The word hangs over their heads like a vicious, shining hook. He says it is useless to make time predictions, but Marian’s great age is on her side. Amelia hates him for using the words “great age.”

  They drive home in silence.

  Marian sits in a chair at the dining room table. She hasn’t said a word in the hour and a half since they left the doctor’s office, and Amelia, following her lead, has been silent. Marian has the day’s mail in her hands. She opens a large brown envelope with the letter opener that has always fascinated Amelia: ivory with a series of parading elephants on the handle.

  The letter is from the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

  Marian puts on her glasses. She seems, Amelia thinks, to be taking a very long time to read the letter. She takes her glasses off. She puts them down beside the letter on the table. She rubs her hands over her eyes, roughly, back and forth, as if she were trying to rub something out, erase it slowly, deliberately, once and for all.

  “They’re starting the egg-addling program again.”

  “Oh, Meme, that’s awful. But we won’t give up.”

  “We will, my dear. We will. It’s over now, it seems,” she says, rubbing her eyes again. “It seems my disappointments have caught up with me.”

  Amelia doesn’t know what to say: “disappointment” is a strange word to use on the day you get the news of your impending death. A middle-range word, not grand, not tragic, someone failing to show up for a rendezvous. She looks across the table. Meme seems to be waiting for her to say something.

  “I didn’t know you were disappointed.”

  “Yes. But it’s something I’ve always tried not to think of.”

  Amelia wants to say to her grandmother, So that’s how you’ve dealt with the troubles of your life, by forgetting what you’ve lost. I can’t do that, she wants to say. For me, it is already much too late.

  •

  Marian has decided against chemotherapy: why despoil the last days of her life? She has outlived most of her friends. Each loss was like the slow erosion of a chalky cliff, the pressure of some heavy foot that caused a gradual, steady crumbling until, at the bottom, there is a pile of irregularly shaped pieces, some large, some smaller, negligible, some of them, some seeming the evidence of a calamity. There was the first death, larger than the others and of a shape that could not be duplicated. There were no similarities between the first death and what could be called the other deaths. Or were all deaths just the first death replayed, lighter in tone, but taking the harmonics from the great original? The first death, the most terrible. The truest beloved. Johnny. Shocking because she was young, and it was unexpected, and she saw it, and it was his own hand that brought it about. She forces herself to believe in immortality, against all reason, because she must must must see her brother again.

  She feels fortunate that there is no one alive whose life will be made unbearable by her death. It is a luxury that there is no one for whom she has to go on living, for whose sake staying alive is a responsibility, a duty reluctantly but stoically carried out. When she dies, there will be sadness, yes, but not the sadness that destroys, that blows apart the wish to live. She knows, and realizes it’s a sign of her prosperity, that two people, Helga and Amelia, will mourn her; their lives will be (but not for too long and not with an irreparably deep cut) marked by grief. Or, perhaps, there are three people, or even four. Rosa and Graham. But each of them have loved others more intensely. Rosa could not live without Helga, and Graham could not go on living if he lost his son. “I couldn’t live without Alex,” he has often said. But having lost the first, the irreplaceable, she knows that it’s always possible to go on living; it isn’t the loss of the beloved itself that brings one to the point of death, it’s the blotting out of the appetite for life, the distaste for any possible action.

  But Helga is incapable of inaction. Helga, beside whom Marian has worked for fifty years, digging, planting, fertilizing, watering, fretting, and celebrating. What would she have done without Helga’s support? Poor Helga, who could never be allowed to die.

  One death she would not be able to survive. If Amelia died before her—an accident, an illness—the shock would literally, Marian believes, bring on her own death.

  Although she knows her death will not destroy Amelia’s life, she worries about its impact. Rather than being toughened by her father’s death, Amelia seems permanently, perhaps not weakened, but made fragile, and Marian feels that, having achieved the unseemly distinction of having outlived her son, Amelia’s father, she has a greater responsibility than the ordinary grandmother for protecting her grandchild from the blow of her death.

  She phones Naomi. Naomi weeps when Marian tells her the news of her diagnosis, and Marian is surprised. She’d thought Naomi was tougher than that. Together, they had faced Jeremy’s illness and death; she doesn’t remember Naomi weeping once in all that time.

  “It’s just that somehow you were always one of those mountains I could look to and say, ‘Well, it’s there, I’m all right.’ I always felt with you I had a strong accompaniment. I will feel much more unaccompanied when you’re gone.”

  “Well, you have Amelia. And that’s why I called, because I’m worried for her.”

  “Amelia is stronger than you think.”

  “I thought you were the one who said she lacked force.”

  “Force and strength aren’t the same thing, Marian. You know better than that. You were always such a stickler for the right way of describing things. She doesn’t have force, but she’s not weak. It’s partly her looks, you know how it was with Jeremy, they look like they can’t stand up to a strong wind, but there’s something deceptive about that, almost a part of their modesty, keeping their strengths in the shadow. Let her help you, Marian. Don’t be afraid to lean on her.”

  •

  Amelia and her grandmother are doing dishes together after an early supper. Marian doesn’t have a dishwasher. She stands at her sink, a sink whose very inconvenience pleases her: its plain, unmodern whiteness, its shape—a long, shallow, rectangular basin—and its brass taps. Amelia stands beside her, drying the dishes with a white towel bordered by a thick red stripe.

  “The days are shortening,” Amelia says. “I don’t like that.”

  “I’m dying, Amelia,” Marian says. “I don’t like euphemisms, and I don’t like evasions. We have to be practical. I’m going to need your help.”

  “Ah,” Amelia says, as if she suddenly understood the answer to a mathematical problem or had found a map hidden underneath a couch, behind a chair. “The most important thing, Meme, is to te
ll me exactly, and I mean exactly, what you want. Or maybe the most important thing is to tell me what you don’t want.”

  What Marian wants, to her surprise, is to give up domestic responsibility. Each morning, she wakes defeated by the prospect of preparing food, sweeping the floors, doing the laundry. She is shocked at how little it takes to tire her, and the prospect of incessant fatigue frightens her as the prospect of her own death does not. Fatigue brings back a time she doesn’t want brought back. And she dreads a future of endless requests that might become a burden to her granddaughter. Her granddaughter is young. The young should not, she believes, be burdened by the old.

  She is astonished at how little she has to say to Amelia, how easily her granddaughter understands what needs to be done, how deft her movements are, as if the whole business of keeping up the house were a dance to which she had, for years, known the steps, and has been just waiting to perform on stage. Marian takes to waking at four knowing that Amelia has to be to work at five. What a pleasure it is, drinking Amelia’s delicious coffee, eating the muffins she brings home from the bakery every night. Marian doesn’t like to tell Amelia that she really doesn’t enjoy the cupcakes. They’re too sweet, too uninflected in their sweetness, and Marian only likes sweets when they include a contrast: something bitter, or neutral, or spiced.

  It’s clear to Marian that Amelia much prefers making soups and stews to presenting a meal centered around meat or fish.

  They agree to eat only the meat sold on a farm owned by friends of Amelia’s; she is content that the animals had a good life, weren’t fed unnatural things, and were brought to their deaths as easily as possible. Most often, though, Amelia and her grandmother eat soups and stews whose main ingredients are vegetables, beans, and obscure grains, many of whose names Marian has never heard. In late August, they gorge on melons. They spend a whole day making pear tarts, intending to give some to Helga and Rosa and some to Graham. But then, reveling in their own greed, they decide to share with no one.

  —

  “Can you make a nice supper for Graham on Wednesday night?” Marian asks. “He’s going to come and talk seriously to us, God spare us.”

  Amelia makes a ratatouille with the overabundant eggplant and zucchini and a chicken with roasted potatoes. To make up for their earlier greed, they make more pear tarts, packing several away for Graham to take home.

  Graham, whatever else he is to her, is Meme’s lawyer. And so if he wants to talk about something serious, it’s probably Meme’s will. What, Amelia wonders, is the right food for the discussion of a will? The pre-death banquet, the rehearsal dinner?

  Usually, the three of them would play Scrabble, at which Marian is surprisingly bad, Amelia shockingly good, Graham occasionally winning. “That’s because it’s not really a game about words, it’s about spatial relationships,” Marian once said. She seems to have, for some reason Amelia can’t grasp, a stake in understanding Graham as a charming fool.

  “Meme, you can’t be illiterate and win at Scrabble,” Amelia said, solicitous about Graham’s feelings even in his absence.

  “I suppose,” Marian said.

  “No Scrabble tonight, my ladies,” Graham says now. “We’re here to talk about your grandmother’s plans and the details of what she wants after she passes.”

  “I’m not passing, Graham, I’m dying. When people say ‘passing,’ all I can think of is passing gas.”

  Graham laughs. “Okay, my darling, when you kick the bucket, buy the farm, go into the wild blue yonder…how’s that?”

  “Much better,” she says.

  “The long and short of it, Amelia, is that your grandmother doesn’t have much in assets, almost nothing. She’s leaving her share of the nursery to Helga—I wouldn’t be surprised if it eventually comes to you, but never mind. For right now, what she has is the house, and that will be yours.”

  “But if you want to sell it,” Marian says, “you don’t have to feel like you’re dancing on my grave.”

  “I wouldn’t sell it, Meme. I love this house.”

  “Yes, you think you love it because you’ve never had to take care of it. But that might prove to be a burden, and a legacy should be liberation, not a burden.”

  —

  Her grandmother is right. She will have to think of the house in a new way, the house that she has loved so easily, with such clarity, as she has loved her grandmother easily, clearly, the house and her grandmother, inseparable in her mind, what she thought of when she had to think of the word “home.”

  Home in the way that the house in Westwood doesn’t seem to be. She wasn’t a child there; the family lived first in Palo Alto, when her mother was in graduate school, then for five years in Mexico City, where her mother followed her mentor, a Mexican urban planner, who then relocated to Los Angeles, to which they followed him again. Through all those changes, every summer she came to Meme’s house, where nothing changed, where everything was always as she had left it, waiting for her, enclosing, limited, and sweet.

  If her grandmother’s house was her grandmother, the Westwood house was her mother. She wonders if it is only women whose houses become their bodies, or whose bodies become their houses. The Westwood house had nothing to do with her father’s body. Her father seemed barely to inhabit it, although he spent many more hours in it than her mother did. He stayed at home with Amelia while her mother was out saving a city, many cities, some of them thousands of miles away. A studio was set up for him in the basement; his kiln was there, and shelves and shelves overfilled with pots, vases, plates that he brought to craft fairs and flea markets, hoping they would sell. Amelia always went with him, collecting the money for the sales that were always far more rare than she hoped. She would leave each craft fair, each flea market, saddened for herself rather than her father. Her beautiful, gentle father, to whom it never seemed to occur to be ashamed or disappointed. Whistling, making up songs as he repacked the pots, the vases, the plates, each carefully, each like a loved young animal, and lifted the heavy crates into the van. Not seeing the disappointment on his wife’s face when she asked, “Had a good day?” His reply was always, “Good enough,” and he’d tell her about the wonderful conversation he had had with the person who bought the vase, the mug, the plate.

  Everything in the Westwood house had straight lines; Marian once said to Amelia of her mother, “She only knows one way of proceeding: straight ahead,” and she knew her grandmother was right. The house had been designed to be earthquake proof and energy efficient. Amelia understood that the house was considered enviable, although she’d never met anyone who said they envied it. It was admirable rather than lovable…as her mother was admirable, but also lovable, because, in her headlong straightforwardness, she sometimes crashed straight into what she didn’t see. Amelia would never say she didn’t love her mother; her mother was a bulwark, a shelter, a defense against the hostile elements. And after her father died, she found a new reason to admire and love her. She learned from her mother’s mother only then that Naomi had wanted to be a singer. She said that Naomi had had a “fine contralto”—only after her course in music history did Amelia know what that meant. Only then did Amelia ask her mother why she’d given it up. Naomi explained that she knew Amelia’s father would always have trouble making a living, and that she knew she didn’t have the “fire in the belly” that a career as a singer required.

  Amelia thought that was a troubling image: fire in the belly; it sounded unpleasant, but her mother made it sound desirable. Amelia knew she had no fire in her belly. And she didn’t feel it in her grandmother, either. No, Meme was a warm lap, a curve that had a space for things, for something that might never come into being and that certainly had no name. Did that mean she loved her grandmother better than she loved her mother? She wouldn’t consider that for a minute. But she knows she has always been more comfortable with Meme. With her mother, you always felt you had to be sitting up straight; her mother always seemed poised for something, the next new thing. She
loved new things; it’s why she was good at her job.

  But nothing in Meme’s house is new; nothing has hard edges; you can rest anywhere. Everywhere she goes in her grandmother’s house, she feels safe. By safe, does she mean comfortable? That, she has always feared, is not admirable.

  The house in Westwood is large and wide and open; the light always seems to Amelia too much of all one thing. In Meme’s house, the light can change in seconds because of the movement of a cloud or the swaying of a branch, or even mysteriously at high noon in midsummer. Each object in the house absorbs the light, softens, divides it—as with the brass pokers by the fireplace that give off a series of bronzed reflections—landing somewhere unexpected: falling on the brown corduroy of the easy chair, the white china dog that serves as a doorstop at the entrance to the living room.

  She thinks that maybe the light in the California house is too much of all one thing because the house prides itself on its unified openness to the world. Nothing is hidden—except that it is. Everything you need is behind the doors of the built-in cabinets that present to the world only a white matte plane: there aren’t even knobs or handles. You press a door at a particular place, and then a revelation occurs. There it is, what you are looking for: pencils, pens, glasses, dishes, books.

  But in Meme’s house, nothing is only one thing. Each room is divided into sections, even the small bedrooms upstairs—really, as her mother has pointed out, not a separate floor but an attic—take their shape from the relation of the walls to the roof. When she was small, she would count the number of sections dividing the walls and ceilings of her grandmother’s bedroom. When her parents visited, she slept on a cot in her grandmother’s room, and, until she was twelve, she asked if she could stay there even after her parents had gone, which Meme always allowed. Later, when Amelia took geometry, she learned that the shape of the room was trapezoidal, made up of a series of larger or smaller trapezoidal panels of dark wood.