by Robin Black
I took some salad and passed the bowl. Every embarrassing episode I could remember had something to do with throwing myself at someone, flirting outrageously with a professor, kissing the boyfriend of a friend. I couldn’t see how parading a series of disinhibited-crush stories was going to help. “Nora, why don’t you tell us what you have planned, now that you’re back stateside? Are you working? Do you have a job?”
“Well, I’m looking,” she said. “It’s not a great time to be your basic generic English-major college grad. It used to be if you were willing to work for pretty low pay, you could get a job, but it’s not that easy now. It’s really hard.”
“I’m sure you’re underselling yourself,” I said.
“She is,” Alison said. “Nora’s got all kinds of things she could do.”
“And you’ll never regret having read all those books,” Owen said—which I thought sounded a little pompous and not really like him, even though it was a sentiment he doubtless believed.
As we ate, the conversation continued to revolve around Nora. We heard about her trip to Italy and, prompted by Owen, she talked about the writing she had done in college—blushing again, all through that topic.
“I did a modern take on The Decameron,” she said. “That was my thesis. A reconsideration of the stories, as if they were in current-day America. I read Italian, so that part was fun.”
“That sounds ambitious,” Owen said. “You must have something like a book.”
“Well, maybe it’s like a book, but it’s definitely not a real book. They’re pretty bad. I mean, it was a good experience, but it’s not anything I’d want to work on ever again.”
She didn’t remind me of Laine—not at all, Laine with her tattoos, her exploding enthusiasms, and her longing for badass creds—except in the unself-conscious way the young can talk so obsessively about themselves, sometimes charmingly, sometimes tediously. I wondered if Alison had any impulse to redirect the topic or nudge her daughter to ask us some questions about our lives, but she seemed entirely happy just listening. Occasionally, she would beam my way, as if to say Isn’t she just amazing? Isn’t she lovely? And I would beam back, all the while feeling a steadily growing emotional pressure in myself. What must it feel like to be so adored? To be able to change how a parent carries herself? To produce such expressions of joy? My father had rewarded our accomplishments and expressed a quiet pride in us. But was he ever blinded by love? Would he ever have just basked in the sound of my voice? Heard every word I spoke on a flattering frequency?
And then, as the minutes passed, the inevitable, ancient question: Would my mother have? Would she have given me this devoted attention, this unchallenged right to center stage? It was easy enough to think so, sitting there. Charlotte, all of seven when our mother died, had often told me stories about the fun we all had baking cupcakes, singing in the car, playing in the park. She loved pushing us on swings, she would say, trying to slip her memories into my soul. She kissed us goodnight every night, in bed. She woke us up with kisses, too. In a sense it had worked. I carried distinct images to go with every story Charlotte told, each snippet hovering in the generous space where imagination and memory blur. She sang songs in French sometimes. But since Charlotte’s death, I had felt those images fade as well. And my father was now incapable of having the conversations that he had always refused to have—unless his roulette-wheel mind happened to spin that way one day.
Watching Alison and Nora, smiling at them when appropriate, asking questions as needed to keep the conversational flow, I realized that there was no one left who could remember my mother. Maybe a cousin somewhere, an old neighbor. But not anyone close to me. Not anyone I could find. It had turned out to be a three-stage death: first hers, then Charlotte’s, and then this horrifying slow leak taking place in my father’s brain. And then there were none.
“You looked preoccupied at dinner,” Owen said, as we lay in bed later in the dark, both of us just too drunk to consider trying to work. “You looked a little blue.”
“I may be a little blue,” I said. “It will pass.”
“Anything I can do?”
It turned out that there was, though until he had asked, I hadn’t known. Darkness and sex. Desire poured from me in a way I didn’t expect and I’m sure he didn’t either as I wrapped my arms around his back, pulling him close enough that at moments the goal became barely sexual, but only an embrace so intense that I could feel nothing else.
My dear Laine, I wrote the next morning. Huge embarrassed apologies for taking so long to respond. It’s been a difficult summer here and I’ve been waiting for time enough to give you a full sense of things, but then of course that time never does come. Owen has been struggling with work and my father’s health is deteriorating. And we have a neighbor! This is such a huge change. I like her—which is a blessing because at these close quarters if she were awful it could be a disaster. But even that, just making a new friend, is strangely disruptive. You know what a hermit I can be if left to my own devices.
Mostly, though, I am so happy to hear that the summer has been a productive one for you. (And I hope that’s still true …) And by productive I mean both art and dumping any poser boyfriends. It’s been productive for me too, in spite of all these distractions. I’m at work on a project, a series of paintings that are exciting me in a way I haven’t felt for years. But of course I’m also thrown right back to where we all get thrown with anything new: the whipsaw of imagined greatness and certain failure. You would think after all these years there would be some way to moderate the extremes, but apparently not. So I am pinging around in a distinctly bipolar way, but I am being productive, so I don’t really care that I feel a little unhinged.
I stopped then. Because I had surprised myself with that word. Did I feel unhinged? Not at that moment. But I left it in.
I hadn’t known your father was marrying. I hope it is a fun event.
I deleted that.
I hadn’t known your father was marrying. Please give him my best.
I deleted that.
I hope the wedding is wonderful. My best wishes to you all.
I settled on that and went on,
Please don’t hold my slow reply against me and please let me know what you’re up to, soon. And next time, ahem, a few pictures of your work wouldn’t hurt. I want to see what you’re doing! I am certain that it’s wonderful.
Love,
Augie
I might never receive the adoration I’d watched young Nora receive all night, but I didn’t have to ignore the one person alive on whom I could lavish it.
9
From my studio, all that Sunday, I caught glimpses of activity by Alison’s house and toward the barn and on the path between, but I tried not to keep close track of the comings and goings—of anyone. The two women out in the car. The younger popping in to ask her new favorite author for some advice. The man crossing over the hill, a book in hand. I tried not to keep track. I didn’t altogether succeed. Not at first. But gradually it all faded into background.
When I was a child, long before it occurred to anyone to be sensitive about such things, my sisters and I had special parent visiting days at our school. Celebrate Mom! It wasn’t always that bad; but we were almost always the only children without a mother, and in the 1960s, the ’70s, a visiting parent still meant a visiting mom. Each of us dealt with it differently. Charlotte, the ultimate lemonade-from-lemons girl, would try to share a friend’s mother for the day, and when asked at dinner how it went would say, “Fine. It was fun,” as though there were no reason to imagine otherwise. Jan, the youngest and probably the smartest of us all, would announce matter-of-factly that she would be staying home, interrupting our father’s gruff offer to wander over from his own classroom, before he could get all the words out. And I would take the middle path, the compromise solution that so often means misery. I would go to school. And feel sorry for myself. Not pretend I had a mother. Not pretend my father was an acceptable substitut
e. Not pretend at all. But tough it out.
That was the idea anyway, but we can be more self-protective than we intend. I don’t remember the earliest events, first grade, second grade, not clearly, not beyond the regular pulse of self-pity and jealousy beating through my heart. But I do remember a parents’ day when I was eleven or so and realized that I could be there and still not be there at all. I only had to draw. Or paint. Or not even do either of those things, but just imagine doing them; think about what my next picture would be; and look around me, no longer seeing mothers and children, only objects, subjects, surfaces. Light.
During the second day of Nora’s visit, I retreated again to that place.
I worked on the boy on my front steps again, Oliver Farley, using my drawings for early reference, continuing to paint around the empty canvas I thought of as him. Our rarely used front door is black, and I worked a good long time that day defining the raised panels, catching the gleam of the large brass doorknob, then muting it, as in real life, showing it worn and softened with age. That doorknob, barely a third of an inch on my canvas, took me the better part of two hours—and I knew I might need to change it later if another look outside revealed any missteps.
I sometimes think of such visual details as deep, private pools of water into which I dive alone. I am oblivious at those times to anything beyond my sense that there is a way to communicate to others exactly how the world appears to me. This is the precision for which I strive. Some kind of commitment to accuracy, my belief that the appearance of a thing can flow right through me and out to another set of eyes. And not just the appearance, but the beauty to be found—even in things not inherently beautiful. There is an urgency I feel, maybe with its roots in those early childhood days of using art as an escape, but maybe not. Maybe just a part of me, whatever the history of my life.
I went through a period, in college, and for a while after then, of accepting that my work was old-fashioned—and fretting over the condemnation of that term. I had friends who were conceptual artists, of course, friends who did bizarre, socially disruptive installations, friends who were blessed—I believed—with the conviction that they could reinvent not only art, but thought. And I could do neither, I knew, which knowledge deflated me. But in the end I understood that I had no choice. I knew what I was, this vessel for taking in, holding, and then releasing again the facts of what I saw.
And there were arguments of course, late-night debates with our ever-present artist friends, since that word, facts, is not itself an accurate one. Each observation I have and then try to convey—always, that word, convey, always that desire to communicate—was warped and altered by my perspective. But it was an accurate enough way to describe what I understood myself to be, and an accurate enough way to describe the sensations that created the isolated trance into which I would fall while at work.
At some point that morning, Owen leaned in to say he was taking the women into town for lunch, asking if I wanted to come along; and I said no, but thanked him and told him to have fun. I didn’t add that I’d had enough for a twenty-four-hour period of watching Alison worship Nora and Nora worship Owen, but I had.
By the time they came back, though I heard the car and then voices, it all seemed distant again. This was the power I had discovered as a motherless child, and could still access—sometimes. The power to make the unreal real, and make the real world go away.
But then in the late afternoon, while my focus was set entirely on the diamond-shaped leaded glass windows on either side of our front door, reality asserted itself. The phone. My father, out of control again. He had broken a mug and used it to threaten a nurse. There were going to have to be some changes after all. Could I be there the next morning for a consult?
It wasn’t a question. I would go.
Owen would go too. That also wasn’t a question. For a moment, I’d thought he wouldn’t offer, that the lure of an admiring young acolyte would keep him home, but I had underestimated him. There wasn’t a breath of distance between us as we sat at our sorrowful dinner and talked through the coming process. Winnowing, winnowing. When we’d first moved my father, we’d winnowed the old house into his new efficiency apartment; and now we would winnow again. But even the winnowing had been winnowed. It wouldn’t be a big job this time. No kitchen for him—too dangerous to have breakables that could be hurled, knives, even forks. And barred windows from now on too. Winnowed windows. Winnowed windows for my winnowing widower father. As I fell asleep my mind was filled with such phrases, nonsense, surrendering to the nonsensical nature of life.
We met the doctor at eight in the family conference room, furnished like a mid-level hotel, decorated with posters of worse-than-mediocre art, pointless, meaningless washes of pastels, framed in gold. We sat at a lacquered mahogany table that shone in ways that struck me, ever obsessive about shine, about shadow, as artificial in some way. The doctor was a youngster, an unfamiliar face who must have started there over the summer, almost Owen’s height with coarse red hair through which he ran his enormous hand at regular intervals. He looked nervous and not up to the job of telling us what he had to tell us—even though we already knew what he would say and he knew that we knew. A necessary relocation. A different protocol. There was a three-strikes policy, he said. I pointed out that there had only been two strikes.
“It’s possible no one told you about the first, in case it was a one-time event.”
I wondered if the young nurse, Lydia, guilty still about provoking his flood of tears, had spared me a report.
Inexperienced and filled with more rules than wisdom, the doctor then went into unnecessary detail about the policy itself—about how sometimes it turned out that the nature of a single episode might be enough to trigger a change and in other cases the three-strikes policy could be suspended and on and on, as Owen and I raised our eyebrows at one another and widened our eyes but managed somehow not to be rude while we brought the conversation back to my father and his care.
“Has he been told what’s going on?” I asked.
No. He hadn’t. They always preferred to have family there to help explain it all to the patient. “Though in my experience,” the doctor said, the notion of experience hanging around him like a too-large overcoat, “that can actually sometimes make things worse.”
“How reassuring,” I muttered to Owen as we trailed down the hall.
My father had always had a temper, but of a quiet, steady kind. It was part of what made him so effective as a teacher, I thought, that he knew when to be angry and allowed himself to be, but not in a dramatic way. And certainly not with any threat of violence. Clarity. That was one of his defining qualities. He would never yell and scream but he didn’t buy the idea of calling anger by euphemistic names. When Owen and I were still in Philadelphia, surrounded by young families, we would hear the same parental spiel over and over: I’m not angry, I’m just upset; I’m not angry, I’m just frustrated; I’m not angry, I was just worried about where you were.
“I am furious at you both,” my father would say if Charlotte and I came home late. And it meant a week of grounding or extra chores or both; and it also meant a day or so of palpable, lingering anger, detectable in a lack of interest in whatever we had to say, the failure to involve us in deciding what dinner would be for a while. We were ignored as he went into the backyard, lit a cigarette, and sat by himself, or disappeared into his bedroom—a couple of pull-ups on his way.
But what I saw in his eyes the day we walked into his little apartment was something new. A wild animal had slipped beneath his skin.
“Hi, Dad,” I said.
“Hi, Sam,” Owen said.
He didn’t know us. And he didn’t like us. I looked at the doctor for guidance and was surprised to find a transformed man. In this setting, he exuded authority. Later, in the car, I would tell Owen that should I ever be in a demented, disoriented rage, that was the doctor I wanted him to phone. He called my father Mr. Edelman, which alone seemed to soothe him—
in a way that neither “Dad” nor his first name had. Here was a young fellow calling him Mr. Edelman. Could he feel himself becoming the teacher again?
“It seems like you’ve been having a tough time, Mr. Edelman.”
“This black woman …” My father gestured toward the door. I felt the blood rise to my cheeks. “She won’t let me go out.”
“Yes. That’s right. Those are my orders. I asked the nurses to make sure you stay put. We don’t allow our patients to do anything unsafe.”
“Ha!” My father looked at me. “Any time a Jew is locked up, you want to watch for that. Any time they start talking about their orders …”
“Your daughter …,” the doctor began; and my father frowned.
“That’s me,” I said. “Augusta.”
He shrugged a little, made a face, not arguing the point but not entirely accepting it either. “And this?” he asked, with a shift in gaze.
“My husband. Owen. You like him.”
He looked doubtful.
“You used to like him. I promise.”
The doctor cleared his throat. “We have to make a few changes, Mr. Edelman. Starting with your room. We’re moving you to a different part of the facility. You’ll have some of the same nurses there with you, at least for a while, so it won’t be all new.”
“And I can visit you much more. If you want.”
“In general, you’ll be getting a more steady level of care …”
The unfamiliar rage in my father’s eyes had been replaced by a look I did recognize: utter bewilderment, filmed over with an attempt to hide it. He nodded, as if comprehending, while clearly not comprehending. The doctor explained that though he would be moving that day, we’d have a little while to move his belongings. “Your daughter will make sure you have the things that matter most to you.”
