by Mary Rickert
“Oh, big deal, mommy and daddy watch her very closely. She has to go see the psychiatrist. She doesn’t have any friends. Big fucking deal. What a hard life!”
“Steff.”
“Don’t tell me about suffering. I know about suffering.”
“Steff, honey—”
“Everyone said it was a mistake for me to come back here. They said you wouldn’t like me anymore.”
“Honey, that’s not true. I love you.”
“You love who I used to be, not who I am now.”
“Well, you’re dead.”
“Like it’s my fault.”
The dead are jealous, jealous, jealous and they will do anything to keep you from the living, the lucky living. They will argue with you, and distract you, and if that doesn’t work, they will even let you hug them, and dance for you, and kiss you, and laugh, anything to keep you. The dead are selfish. Jealous. Lonely. Desperate. Hungry.
It isn’t until she brings you a flower, dead for weeks, and hands it to you with that poor smile, that you again remember the living. “I have to call Maggie.”
“Forget about her.”
“No, I have to tell her.”
“Look at me, Mommy.”
“Sweetheart.”
“Look what you did.”
“It wasn’t me.”
She walks away.
“It wasn’t.”
She keeps walking.
You follow. Of course, you follow.
The phone rings. Such a startling noise. I roll into my blankets. Simultaneously I realize the night was cool enough for blankets and that the phone didn’t ring all summer. I reach for it, fumbling across the bedside table, and knock off the photograph from Steff’s last birthday.
“Hello?”
“See you next spring.”
“Steff? Where are you?”
There is only a dial tone. I hang up the phone. Throw off the covers. “Steff!” I call. “Steff!” I look in her bedroom but she’s not there. I run down the stairs and through the house, calling her name. The blue throw is bunched up on the couch, as if she’d sat there for a while, wrapped up in it, but she’s not there now. I run outside, the grass cold against my feet. “Steff! Steff!” She is not in the garden, or the studio. She is not in the yard. A bird cries and I look up through the apple tree branches. One misshapen apple drops while I stand there, shivering in my nightgown. Everything is tinged with brown, except the leaves of the old oak, which are a brilliant red.
A squirrel scurries past. There is a gentle breeze and one red leaf falls. I wrap my arms around myself and walk into the house, fill the teakettle, set it on the burner to boil. I sit at the kitchen table and stare at the garden. I should plant some bulbs. Order firewood. Arrange to have the driveway plowed when it snows. The teakettle whistles. I walk across the cool floor, pour the water into the pot. I leave it to steep and go to the living room, where she left the blue throw all balled up. I pick it up and wrap it around myself. It smells like her, musty, sour.
It smells like Maggie too, last Christmas Eve when she spoke to me in the supermarket. What a risk that was for her. Who knows, I might have been like Mrs. Bialo, or her parents; I might have laughed at her. Instead, I became her friend and then cast her aside at the first sign of trouble.
How many chances do we get? With love? How many times do we wreck it before it’s gone?
I don’t even drink the tea but dress in a rush. All my clothes are too big on me and I see in the mirror how tired I look, how much new gray is in my hair. Yet, there’s something else, a sort of glow, a happiness. I miss her, the one who died, and her ghost is my responsibility, a relationship based on who we lost, while Maggie is a friend, a relationship based on what we found.
All summer I only left for groceries. Stephanie would stand at the top of the driveway, watching me with those cold, narrow eyes as if suspicious I wouldn’t come back. Out of habit I look in the rearview mirror, but all I see is a patch of brown grass, the edge of the house.
It’s easy to find the Dwinder residence. They live right next to the church in a brick house with red geraniums dropping teardrop-shaped petals onto the porch. I ring the bell. Nancy answers, in a pink terry cloth robe.
“I’m sorry, I forgot how early it is.”
She brushes a hand through her red hair. “That’s all right. We were getting ready for church.”
“There’s something I have to tell Maggie. Is she home?”
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”
“Honey, who is it?” The reverend comes to the door in plaid flannel pants and a t-shirt, his dark hair tousled, his face wrinkled with sleep. “Oh. Chloe, how are you?”
“I’m sorry to disturb you, it’s just—”
“She wants to talk to Maggie.”
“I’ll tell her you’re here.” The reverend turns back into the house.
Nancy continues to stare at me, then, just as I hear Maggie saying, What does she want? she blurts, “She’s been better since she’s stopped seeing you.” I’m not sure if this is meant as an accusation or an apology and before I can find out, Maggie comes to the door dressed in torn jeans and a violet t-shirt, her hair in braids. She meets my gaze with those dark eyes.
“Coffee’s ready!” the reverend calls and Nancy turns away, her pink-robed figure receding slowly down the hall.
“Yeah?”
“I was hoping, if you can forgive me, I was hoping we could be friends again.”
“I can’t be her replacement, you know.”
“I know.”
“You hurt me a lot.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Can you ever forgive me?”
She frowns, squints, then tilts her head slightly, and looks up at me. “I guess.”
“Please. Stop by. Any time. Like you used to.”
She nods and shuts the door gently in my face.
On a sunny but cold day, as the last crimson leaves flutter to earth, and apples turn to cider on the ground, I shovel last winter’s ash onto the garden. A flock of geese flies overhead. I shade my eyes to watch them pass and when I look down again, she is standing there in baggy jeans and an old blue peacoat, unbuttoned in the sun.
It’s as though I’ve been living in one of those glass domes and it’s been shaking for a long time, but in this moment has stopped, and after all that flurry and unsettling, there is a kind of peace. “Maggie.”
For a moment we only look at each other, then she puts her hand on her hip, rolls her eyes, and says, “You wouldn’t believe what they’re making us do in gym, square dancing!”
All life is death. You don’t fool yourself about this anymore. You slash at the perfect canvas with strokes of paint and replace the perfect picture of your imagination with the reality of what you are capable of. From death, and sorrow, and compromise, you create. This is what it means, you finally realize, to be alive.
You try to explain this to Maggie. You hear yourself talking about bitter seeds, and sweet fruit. She nods and doesn’t interrupt but you know you have not successfully communicated it. This is all right. The grief is so large you’re not sure you want her, or anyone, to understand it, though you wish you could describe this other emotion.
You stand in the ash of your garden. All this time you didn’t realize what you’d been deciding. Now you are crying, because with the realization of the question comes the answer. It is snowing and white flakes fall onto the garden, sticking to the brown stems and broken flowers, melting into the ash. You look up to the sunless white sky. Cold snow tips your face and neck. You close your eyes, and think, yes. Oh, life. Yes.
Anyway
“What if you could save the world? What if all you had to do was sacrifice your son’s life, Tony’s for instance, and there would be no more war, would you do it?”
“Robbie’s the name of my son,” I say. “Remember, Mom? Tony is your son. You remember Tony, don’t you?”
I reach into the cabinet where I’ve stored the photo
graph album. I page through it until I find the picture I want, Tony and me by his VW just before he left on the Kerouac-inspired road trip from which he never returned. We stand, leaning into each other, his long hair pulled into a ponytail, and mine finally grown out of the pixie cut I’d had throughout my single-digit years. He has on bell-bottom jeans and a tie-dyed t-shirt. I have on cut-offs and a simple cotton short-sleeved button-down blouse and, hard to see but I know they are there, a string of tiny wooden beads, which Tony had, only seconds before, given to me. I am looking up at him with absolute adoration and love.
“See, Mom.” I point to Tony’s face. She looks at the picture and then at me. She smiles.
“Well, hello,” she says, “when did you get here?”
I close the book, slide it into the cabinet, kiss her forehead, pick up my purse, and walk out of the room. I learned some time ago that there is no need for explanation. She sits there in the old recliner we brought from her house, staring vacantly at nothing, as if I have never been there, not today, or ever.
I stop at the nurse’s station, hoping to find my favorite nurse, Anna Vinn. I don’t even remember the name of the nurse who looks up at me and smiles. I glance at her nametag.
“Charlotte?”
“Yes?”
“My mother asked me the strangest question today.”
Charlotte nods.
“Do the patients ever, you know, snap out of it? Have you ever heard of that happening?”
Charlotte rests her face in her hand, two fingers under the rim of her glasses, rubbing her temple. She sighs and appraises me with a kind look. “Sometimes, but you know, they . . .”
“Snap right back again?”
“Would you like to talk to the social worker?”
I shake my head, tap the counter with my fingertips before I wave, breezy, unconcerned.
Once outside, I look at my watch. I still have to get the groceries for tomorrow’s dinner. It’s my father’s birthday and he wants, of all things, pot roast. Luckily, my son, Robbie, has agreed to cook it. All I have to do is buy it. I’ve been a vegetarian for eighteen years and now I have to go buy a pot roast.
What if you could save the world? I remember my mother asking the question, so clearly, as if she were really present—in her skin and in her mind—in a way she hasn’t been for years.
“Mom,” I say, as I unlock the car door, “I can’t even save this cow.”
That’s when I realize that a man I’ve seen inside the home, but whom I don’t know by name, stands between my car and his (I assume). He stares at me for a moment and then, with a polite smile, turns away.
I start to speak, to offer some explanation for what he’s overheard, but he is walking away from me, toward the nursing home, his shoulders hunched as if under a weight, or walking against a wind, though it is early autumn and the weather is mild.
On Sunday, my dad and Robbie sit in the kitchen drinking beer while the pot roast cooks, talking about war. I have pleaded with my father for years not to talk to Robbie this way, but he has always dismissed my concerns. “This is men talk,” he’d say, elbowing Robbie in the ribs, tousling his hair while Robbie, gap-toothed and freckled and so obviously not a man, grinned up at me. But now Robbie is nineteen. He drinks a beer and rubs his long fingers over the stubble of his chin. “Don’t get me wrong,” my dad says, “it’s a terrible thing, okay? There’s mud and snakes and bugs, and we didn’t take a shower for three months.” He glances at me and nods. I know that this is meant as a gesture on his part, a sort of offering to me and my peacenik ways.
The smell of pot roast drives me from the kitchen to the backyard. It’s cooler today than yesterday, and the sky has a grayish cast. Most of the leaves have fallen, the yard littered with the muted red, gold, and green. I sit on the back step. “Didn’t take a shower for three months,” my father says again, loudly. I hear him through the kitchen windows that I had cracked open, trying to alleviate the odor of cooked meat.
I listen to the murmur of Robbie’s voice.
“Oh, but it was a beautiful thing,” my dad says. “It was the right thing to do. Nobody questioned it back then. We were saving the world.”
For dessert we have birthday cake, naturally. My dad’s favorite, chocolate with banana filling and chocolate-chip-studded chocolate frosting. I feel quite queasy by this point, the leftover pot roast congealing in the roaster on top of the stove, Robbie’s and my father’s plates gleaming with a light gray coating—it was all I could do to eat my salad. “Why don’t we have our cake in the living room?” I say.
“Aw, no,” my father says. “You don’t have to get all fancy for me.”
But Robbie sees something in my face that causes him to stand up quickly. “Come on, Pops,” he says, and, as my father begins to rise, “you and Mom go in the living room and talk. I’ll bring out the cake.”
I try not to notice the despair that flits over my father’s face. I take him by the elbow and steer him into the living room, helping him into the recliner I bought (though he does not know this) for him.
“I saw Mom today,” I say.
He nods, scratches the inside of his ear, glances longingly at the kitchen.
I steel myself against the resentment. I’m happy about the relationship he’s developed with Robbie. But some small part of me, some little girl who, in spite of my forty-five years, resides in me and will not go away, longs for my father’s attention and, yes, even after all these years, approval.
“She asked me the strangest question.”
My father grunts. Raises his eyebrows. It is obvious that he thinks there is nothing particularly fascinating about my mother asking a strange question.
“One time,” he says, “she asked me where her dogs were. I said, ‘Meldy, you know you never had any dogs.’ So she starts arguing with me about how of course she’s always had dogs, what kind of woman do I think she is? So, later that day I’m getting ice out of the freezer, and what do you think I find in there but her underwear, and I say, ‘Meldy, what the hell is your underwear doing in the freezer?’ So she grabs them from me and says, ‘My dogs!’ ”
“Ha-a-appy birrrrrthday to youuuu.” Robbie comes in, carrying the cake blazing with candles. I join in the singing. My father sits through it with an odd expression on his face. I wonder if he’s enjoying any of this.
Later, when I drive him home while Robbie does the dishes, I say, “Dad, listen, today Mom, for just a few seconds, she was like her old self again. Something you said tonight, to Robbie, reminded me of it. Remember how you said that during the war it was like you were saving the world?” I glance at him. He sits, staring straight ahead, his profile composed of sharp shadows. “Anyway, Mom looked right at me, you know, the way she used to have that look, right, and she said, ‘What if you could save the world? What if all you had to do was sacrifice one life and there would be no more war, would you do it?’ ”
My father shakes his head and mumbles something.
“What is it, Dad?”
“Well, that was the beginning, you know.”
“The beginning?”
“Yeah, the beginning of the Alzheimer’s. ’Course, I didn’t know it then. I thought she was just going a little bit nuts.” He shrugs. “It happened. Lots of women used to go crazy back then.”
“Dad, what are you talking about?”
“All that business with Tony.” His voice cracks on the name. After all these years he still cannot say my brother’s name without breaking under the grief.
“Forget it, Dad. Never mind.”
“She almost drove me nuts, asking it all the time.”
“Okay, let’s just forget about it.”
“All those fights we had about the draft and Vietnam, and then he went and got killed anyway. You were just a girl then, so you probably don’t remember it almost tore us apart.”
“We don’t have to talk about this, Dad.”
I turn into the driveway. My father stares straight ahead. I wait a
few seconds and then open my car door; he leans to open his. When I walk beside him to guide him by the elbow, he steps away from me. “I’m not an invalid,” he says. He reaches in his pocket and pulls out his keys. Together we walk to the door, which he unlocks with shaking hands. I step inside and flick on the light switch. It is the living room of a lonely old man, the ancient plaid couch and recliner, family photographs gathering dust, fake ivy.
“Satisfied?” he says, turning toward me.
I shake my head, shrug. I’m not sure what he’s talking about.
“No boogeymen are here stealing all your inheritance, all right?”
“Dad, I—”
“The jewels are safe.”
He laughs at that. I smile weakly. “Happy birthday, Dad,” I say.
But he has already turned and headed into the bedroom. “Wait, let me check on the jewels.”
My father, the smart aleck.
“Okay, Dad,” I say, loudly, so he can hear me over the sound of drawers being opened and closed. “I get the point. I’m leaving.”
“No, no. The jewels.”
Suddenly I am struck by my fear, so sharp I gasp. He’s got it too, I think, and he’s going to come out with his socks or underwear and he’s going to call them jewels and—
“Ah, here they are. I honest to God almost thought I lost them.”
I sit down on the threadbare couch I have offered to replace a dozen times. He comes into the living room, grinning like an elf, carrying something. I can’t bear to look.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asks, and thrusts a shoebox onto my lap.
“Oh, my God.”
“These are yours now.”
I take a deep breath. I can handle this, I think. I’ve handled a lot already; my brother’s murder, my husband’s abandonment, my mother’s Alzheimer’s. I lift the lid. The box is filled with stones, green with spots of red on them. I pick one up. “Dad, where did you get these? Is that blood?”
