“Sometimes I get the feeling that I was an adopted child,” she said. “I’m just so different from the rest of you.” She would weep on the phone, fall asleep on the couch, and wake up feeling lousy. Now, a little buzzed from morning coffee, she looked down at Evelyn and she cried out. “I’m not ready to let you go, I need you, Mommy! I need you too much!” A horrible silence. She was all alone. She had no mom. No mom. And she ran into Mother’s living room and tried to re-start the old life by contemplating the old coral sofa, the old rocker, the red oriental rug, the painting of the horses in the meadow (A Blessing), the gold fringe on the lampshade, and then she went to the kitchen and climbed up on the stepstool to look for liquor, and found the Kahlúa. She got out a jelly glass, filled it up to the third fish and sang a song Mother had taught her.
Oh the horses stood around with their feet upon the ground and who will wind my wristwatch when I’m gone? We feed the baby garlic so we can find him in the dark, and a girl’s best friend is her mother.
Mother used to say, “A son is a son until he takes a wife but a daughter is a daughter all of her life,” and Barbara sure knew what that meant. Roger and Bennett went their sweet way from the time they learned to ride bikes but she had to stick around and peel potatoes and clean the bathrooms. Those two couldn’t clean a bathroom if you put a pistol to their temples. They went gallivanting off to play tennis and lie around by the lake and eventually off to the University and Mother was pleased if they dropped her a postcard now and then. They could do no wrong. But Barbara was held to a different standard: the assistant mother, the kitchen helper, the little manager, runner of errands.
Well, Mother was all hers now. It was just her and Mother in the house. Roger and Bennett knew nothing. Roger was in Santa Barbara, with his perky wife Gwen, hustling up customers for Milton & Merrill the hedge-fund giant, earning gold stars after his name, making pots of money, flying off to luxury spas and resorts, furnishing their second home in Vail. She would take her sweet time calling him. Maybe she would wait until Tuesday. Bennett was dragging his butt, broke in New York, fermenting in disappointment, a composer and for twenty-three years a security guard at a warehouse in Queens. He sat all night in a tiny office overlooking acres of appliances and wrote music at a computer. So far as she knew, he had never published anything except a few songs. He had written the first act of his opera, Kitty Hawk, and then rewritten it four or five or six times, and he had an unfinished symphony. He had followed his dream in life and gotten lost. A great talent gone to waste, sob sob.
She finished the glass of Kahlúa and went back in the bedroom. “Well, you wanted to die in your sleep. So now you have. You got your wish. Good for you. I hope you’re happy. And I hope you’re not expecting a big funeral because frankly I’m not up for it. I don’t know if you ever noticed, Mother, in your active life befriending everyone and traveling hither and yon, but your daughter has got a lot of problems. A lot.” She was feeling weepy. She thought of calling Oliver but he was working a double shift today. He’d just started clerking at Liberty Gas & Lube on I-94 over near Melrose, having gotten the shaft at 24-Hour Service in St. Cloud, and she hated to interrupt him at work even though he said it was no problem. She just wanted somebody to tell: “My Mother, who I ate lunch with yesterday, is no more. My mama, she be daid.” The day before, Mother had sat in Barbara’s backyard eating a big half-moon of watermelon, leaning forward, spitting seeds into the grass, juice dripping off her chin, and now she was dead. They’d eaten a salad together. Barbara had said, “Do you want me to drive you out to Moonlite Bay?” and Mother said no, Gladys or Margaret would drive.
“I worry about you driving late at night.”
“It’s only five miles.”
And then she was critical of Barbara’s salad. “Those tomatoes you buy at the store aren’t tomatoes at all,” she said. “Ralph never seems to have good tomatoes anymore. These taste like they came from California. Why do that, when we have tomato growers around here? Why do people pay good money for bad food?” And Barbara said she thought the tomatoes were okay, so there was a little back-and-forth over that, and then Mother asked about Kyle, and they argued about whether Barbara was too hard on him, and Mother looked at her and said, “Well, what about you? Why don’t you go back to school? You can’t spend the rest of your life working in a school cafeteria.” Barbara said she liked the people there and the job gave her plenty of time to work on her art. And Mother rolled her eyes and Barbara said, “I know you don’t care for my art but you don’t have to roll your eyes.” Mother said, “Oh don’t be so sensitive, I’m only kidding. Your life is your own. I’m happy for you. Wish you’d introduce me to your boyfriend, but that’s up to you.” And she said that if Barbara wasn’t up for company, then maybe she’d go home and come back sometime when Barbara was in a better mood. “I was in a perfectly good mood until you criticized my salad and my son and my paintings,” said Barbara. “Well, if I’m upsetting you, I’m sorry,” said Mother, standing up to go. A thought balloon over her head, a trail of bubbles leading to it: How did I get such a child? Barbara said, “Where are you going? You come over here for half an hour and run me through the wringer and then you hop up and go? Why can’t we sit and converse like normal people?” “We’re not normal people,” said Mother. “Nobody is. We’re just us. And we are conversing, but you’re in a prickly mood and also you’ve had too much to drink.” Barbara said, “And now you’re going to start in on my drinking—” “No,” Mother said, “I’m going to go home and come back tomorrow when you’re feeling better.” She took her salad plate toward the house and Barbara said, “You can’t just keep walking away from me, Mother. You have to face me someday. I am who I am. I’m not Bennett and I’m not Roger. I’m me.” And Mother said, over her shoulder, not stopping, “I’m glad that you’re you and I wish you a good day and I’ll see you tomorrow.” She headed for the door, opened it, turned and smiled and said, “Pull up your socks, kiddo. And put on some lipstick.” Her valedictory speech. And out the back gate she went and that was Barbara’s last sight of her, those long legs and khaki shorts and white blouse disappearing into the mudroom and now here were those long legs, cold and stiff, under a blanket.
She wished Mother hadn’t walked away like that. She should’ve turned and come back and sat down and let Barbara tell her about Oliver and what a prize he was if only he would slim down. He did guy jobs like disposing of deceased animals and removing bats from the fireplace and was much the same from day to day. You didn’t go to bed with Mr. Chuckles and wake up with Lothar the Barbaric.
She opened the top drawer of the night stand and riffled through the clippings and postcards and aspirin packets and a poem on an index card—one of Mother’s poems….
Life is not land we own.
O no, it is only lent.
In the end we are left alone
When the last light is spent.
So live that you may say,
Lord, I have no regret.
Thank you for these sunny days
And for the last sunset.
Not a great poem, if you ask me, thought Barbara. Sorry Mother.
Under it was an envelope labeled ARRANGEMENTS. She opened it. The letter was typed on thin blue paper with Par Avion printed below and a French flag.
Dear Barbara,
I am writing this on a sunny afternoon on some French stationery I bought when I realized that I’m probably never going to make it to France, which is sad, but oh well. The neighborhood kids are tearing around outside, and it’s hard to think about death now, but I feel I should write this. My parents never did and when my mother died, I had no idea what she would have wanted. So I let Flo make all the arrangements and it was a funeral horror show, a lot of lugubrious music and a hairy legged evangelist ranting and raving, and I thought, “Not for me.” In the event of my death I want you to make arrangements as follows: I wish my body to be laid out in the green beaded rhinestone dress that was a gift from my dear frien
d Raoul the week we spent in Branson, Missouri.—
Barbara stared at the name. Raoul. Who he? Mother had never mentioned a Raoul. There were none in town. A boyfriend. Mother had a boyfriend. Good God.
—I would like someone to be sure to let Andy Williams know that “the lady in the green beaded dress” died and that his kiss on the cheek was one of the true high points of my life. I wish to be cremated. I do not wish to be embalmed and stuck in the ground to rot. I wish my ashes to be placed in the green bowling ball that Raoul also gave me, which somebody can hollow out (I’m told), and then seal it up and I would like the ball to be dropped into Lake Wobegon off Rocky Point where Jack and I used to fish for crappies back years ago when we were getting along. Odd, I know, but I loved bowling with Raoul, we always laughed a lot, so I want to wind up inside a ball. And I loved that part of the lake, where our town is obscured behind the trees and you feel that you might be up north on the Boundary Waters. I do not wish any eulogy or public prayers said for me, none at all, thank you, and the only music I want is Andy Williams singing “Moon River,” which was “our song,” mine and Raoul’s, and I’m sorry to have kept all this a secret from you. I hated that my parents had so many secrets and now I’ve hidden so much from you, dear Barbara. Though it seemed to me that you had more than enough on your mind. I am so sorry that you never met him. He is an old dear friend who I reunited with about twelve years ago. We never got around to becoming a normal couple (long story) but we loved each other and we had some high old times. I realize that these are unusual wishes but you are a strong girl and I know you will respect them. I love you, dear. I always did and I do now, more than ever.
As for my will, it is at the bank in a safety-deposit box along with another letter that I wrote a long time ago and never gave you. Please forgive me.
Love,
Mother
The part about cremation and no eulogy didn’t surprise her. Mother loathed funerals and that’s why she always volunteered to make the lunch, to avoid the sermon and the crappy eulogy, which always went wide of the mark, usually pitched too high. She thought of Mother slipping off for a tryst in Branson with someone named Raoul. Barbara had been there once with Oliver. It was the only trip they had taken. A geezer resort where the face-lifted stars of yesteryear go on singing their hits like demented robots, eyes glazed, a sort of mortuary of pop music. And she thought Mother had gone to St. Louis to visit a cousin with a lingering illness. Mother lied. But Andy Williams? Mother loved choral music. She adored Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. She had never shown an interest in crooners before.
Barbara pulled the sheet up over Mother’s face as she had seen people do in movies. And she reached for the phone to call her son Kyle and she saw the tiny red light blinking on the answering machine. “You have one unheard message,” said the lady’s voice. “Sent today at 1:29 a.m.” Then a click and a gravelly man’s voice.
“Hey, Precious. Couldn’t sleep after I got your message on the machine. Sorry I wasn’t here. Guess you’ve turned in. Gimme a call in the morning, okay? I saw a great deal on airfare to London and I thought maybe we could do that trip to Italy if you like. Fly to London in September—take a train to Rome. Let’s do it.”
Barbara stood by the dead woman’s bed as the man talked to her.
“I don’t know how we got this old, kid. But like you said, after you turn eighty, you’ve gotta live fast. Anyway, I’m sitting here thinking about you. How long does your answering machine let me go on? I forget. Maybe I’m just talking to the wall. Hey, it wouldn’t be the first time, right? I was trying to figure out today when our anniversary is—I mean, do you date it from when we first met? Or is it when we got together again? Now there would be an anniversary. Does Hallmark put out greeting cards for that? Ha ha.—Thinking of you on our Special Day when you and I went all the way—huh? Ha. I think I saved the room key. Listen, I know I’m just nattering on here but what the hell. I’m not the sort of guy who writes things down. So the way I remember is if I tell someone, and who can I tell, right? You. So here I am, yakking into your answering machine. I remember you brought chocolate-chip cookies. And we got into bed and then you got up to use the bathroom and it was the first time I’d seen you without clothes on since the Dyckman Hotel in December of 1941—and you hadn’t changed a bit. This tall slip of a girl getting up out of bed like a goddess rising from the ocean waves and all of a sudden that day in 1941 came back so clear, I could smell the floor wax. Nineteen forty-one. December. The Friday before Pearl Harbor. We went to the dance at Fort Snelling and that colonel made a pass at you and we got the hell out and walked along the river and talked, and we stopped and kissed and I told you that my brother was the night clerk at the Dyckman and you said, ‘Let’s go.’ So we caught the Hiawatha streetcar and you were quiet all the way downtown and up to the room and we sort of groped around in the dark and you said, ‘Not so fast.’ I remember what you said, you said, ‘I wish I could make this minute last for a whole day.’ And then you rolled over on top of me and we went to town and when it was over you said, ‘That was pretty good.’ I’ll always remember that. ‘Pretty good.’ Oh God, why do I keep going back to that? You never look back. I do. Because after that, everything happened so fast. You got that boil and you were so sick, I went to General Hospital to see you and the doctor said it was fifty-fifty, at best. They said only immediate family could see you. Your mother was in the hall crying and I went over and said I was a friend of yours and she looked at me and just cried harder. And then they shipped me to Chicago and the train stopped on an overpass and I could look down Portland Avenue to the hospital where you were and count up to the fourth floor and there was a light on in a room. And then it went out. I cried all the way to Chicago. God, I feel like I am going to cry now.”
She pressed stop. That was enough of him. He sounded like a lot of old men she knew. You put a nickel in them and they told their life story twice.
She dialed Kyle’s number at his apartment in Minneapolis. He picked up on the third ring. He sounded distracted. Kyle was a sophomore at the University, an English major, and he studied all the time.
“It’s Mother, honey. I’m awfully sorry but I have bad news. Grandma died.”
“Omigod.” He let out a breath. “When did she die?” And a girl’s voice said, “What?”
“She died in her sleep. Last night. It must have been sudden. She was reading a book and it fell on the floor and she just died.”
He was crying and the girl was comforting him, she said, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” And she hugged him. Barbara said, “I know it’s a shock. Me, too. I just walked in and there she was. She must’ve had a heart attack.”
“When did it happen?” He was crying, he could hardly get the words out. The girl whispered, “Who died?”
“Last night. Late. She went out for dinner with her buddies and came home and went to bed and she died. In her sleep. She was very peaceful.”
The girl was whispering to him. “My grandma,” said Kyle. “Last night.”
Barbara said that Grandma was not afraid of death, she looked it straight in the eye, and don’t you think she had such a good life because she knew life was short and that pushed her to do more than most people her age would dream of—she talked, listening to him try to take a deep breath and compose himself and this girl, whoever she was, nuzzling him and then it dawned on Barbara that the two of them were naked. Something in the pitch of their voices. A mother can tell. Two naked young people, her freckle-faced boy weeping, and this other person—she imagined a bosomy girl with studs in her nipples and a butterfly tattoo on her butt.
She didn’t tell him that she was, at that very moment, sitting on the bed where the dead body lay. She could see the shape of Mother’s left hand under the sheet. She could have reached out and touched it.
“Are you okay?” he said. Yes, of course she was okay, she only wished she could tell him what it was like to walk in and to find her own mother,
for crying out loud, lying in bed with her eyes open. “I suppose I’m in shock,” she said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do without her.”
She listened hard for the girl to say something.
“When’s the funeral?” Kyle asked.
“Well, that’s what I called you about.” And she read him the letter. Word for word.
“That is so awesome,” he said. He wasn’t crying anymore, he was half laughing. “Wow. A bowling ball!! You mean, like a real bowling ball?”
“I found it in her closet. It’s green. Like green marble. Expensive. It looks Italian.”
“And no eulogy, no prayers. Boy. She had a whole other life, didn’t she.”
“I am just a little worried about this Raoul. What if he shows up?”
“Of course he’ll show up. We’ll invite him. He was her boyfriend. He loved her.” Kyle sounded a little giddy. “God, Grandma! I always thought she had something else going on!”
“You think we should? Really? I don’t know what to do,” said Barbara.
“We’re going to do it just exactly the way she wanted it,” he said. “I’m going to do it myself.” He was all excited now, bouncing around and yipping about his parasail—the one he had built from a kit—what was a parasail? (parasol?)—and now the girl’s voice said, “Kyle, I can’t let you do that. You know how I feel,” and he walked away from her. He was naked in a bedroom in Minneapolis with a girl. Barbara wanted to ask, “Who’s there?” On the other hand she didn’t want to know. A redhead maybe, one of those freckled Irish beauties, howbeit with tiny silver hammers stuck in her nipples. A little trollop who could seduce and ensnare a bright but naïve young man, and lead him off to an itinerant life of miming for spare change on street corners, her smart little boy so good in school, so innocent in the ways of the world, and her eyes filled with tears at the thought of losing him. The boy who achieved Eagle Scout and who put on the white robe every Sunday morning and carried the cross down the church aisle—who had almost not gone to college but his mother made him go, who was on the road to becoming somebody—he was in the clutches of the trollop. Maybe she had interrupted them in the midst of hot sex. She tried to imagine his skinny body intertwined with a girl’s. How weak men are! Educate them all you like, make them read philosophy and history and poetry, but when the waitress leans over the table and her shapely breasts hang like ripe fruit, men go blank, their pants enlarge, intelligence plummets, they are ready to buy whatever is offered and pay any price. Give them the check, they will sign it! Take their shoes, their watch, the loose change jingling in their pocket—they will look at you in awestruck wonder, little girl, and whisper Thank You as you wave good-bye.
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