by Rachel Simon
“Rosalie and Gordon know something’s wrong,” I say.
“They think we’re just being overly protective.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I said . . . I said I was coming because I simply wanted to see her.”
Since Rosalie has begun these lapses, we’ve tried not to speak too insistently about our concern, because there have been moments when we’ve had just enough doubt ourselves. Although Rosalie’s career as a librarian required constant interaction with the public, she’s always fallen short when it comes to social skills. She’s never mastered the conventions of staying on topic, avoiding excruciating detail, picking up cues that a conversation is ending, or gauging the appropriateness of, say, revealing intestinal problems to waiters. So we have indeed wondered if her forgetfulness is just age redrawing character as caricature.
But we don’t think so. Neither do other confidants with whom I’ve been sharing the evidence. Hal says that although we haven’t spent our adult years seeing our mother with the regularity that comes from a more favorable history, we’ve remained in sufficient contact to know that she is indeed stepping beyond the far edge of her personality. My father thinks so, too, though, not having spoken with Rosalie for thirty years, he’s basing his assessment on our reports. I could dismiss this confirmation—Hal and my father have excessive proximity to the matter—but I keep hearing the same from my friend Harriet, who’s the same age as my mother. For years now, since I met Harriet while we were taking out books at a library, she’s offered the nurturing gestures that I might have sought from my own mother on the occasions when I’ve needed mothering, like when Hal and I broke up and Harriet had me sleep over every week to comfort me. Or when Hal and I got married and Harriet took me shopping for wedding day accessories. Or now, as hints are adding up about my mother. “It sounds like the way things began with the husband of a friend of mine,” Harriet said. “But oh, honey, I hope it’s not.”
I do, too, even though my relationship with my mother is far from a typical mother-child relationship. And even though the likelihood of her decline, while alarming, has yet to kindle the emotions that I only wish I could feel.
Laura shares my wish for those feelings, to the point where our thoughts about Rosalie are interchangeable. Fortunately, Hal, my father, and Harriet also understand why I lack what most children would feel, so they express no disapproval when I give them the latest update and fail to add, “My heart is breaking,” or “How will I live without her?” It’s possible that other friends could do the same, say, I do not judge you for having a steamer trunk of emotions that children are not supposed to feel, and for leaving behind a whole house of emotions that you ought to have brought along. After all, over the years I’ve learned that a significant number of friends are also members of this secret club, the one into which we were drafted when our mothers strayed far from what a mother is supposed to be. It’s a club of adult children who question the concept of maternal instinct, feel no sentimentality toward mom clichés like apple pie, and greet every May with grimness, as the quest for a not-too-honest Mother’s Day card rolls around again. But I generally avoid talking about being in that club—it requires too much explanation, and runs the risk that I’ll be viewed as callous. So mostly I’ve revealed Rosalie’s forgetfulness to only these intimates, which has proven easy. Everyone knows I’m deep into a renovation. Who’d have thought that one of the virtues of renovation is how conveniently it monopolizes conversation?
“How did Rosalie reply,” I ask Laura, “when you said you just wanted to see her? It sounds so . . . like a regular daughter.”
“She sounded surprised,” Laura says.
I laugh. “That’s it?”
“No. She hasn’t forgotten that none of us has been there for years.”
“That’s heartening. At least her long-term memory’s intact.”
“Yeah, it was a good sign. But the best part is that she was happy that I was coming.”
“That’s good.”
“It helps me not to dread this trip,” Laura says. “Just knowing she’ll be glad to see me.”
That evening, Hal and I attend a party down the street from Teacher’s Lane. As soon as we walk in the door and see our old neighbors, my inner chatter about Laura’s impending visit subsides to a whisper. I hadn’t realized how omnipresent it had become, but as we catch up with friends, I feel a relief I hadn’t known I’d needed. So at the end of the night, Hal suggests that we delay our departure by visiting the old house. Then he can show me—and our neighbor Susan, who asks to accompany us—all the recent developments.
The door squeaks as Hal enters, flashlight in hand. Susan says, “I can’t see anything,” and as I follow her in, I understand why. Since the electricity is off and the demoed back wall is still covered by plywood, there’s no illumination except the streetlight coming in the front and side windows. But it’s weak, so all we really have is the flashlight’s diameter.
“What are those?” Susan asks. She points to the top of a plaster wall in the living room.
Hal holds the flashlight still, and I see a lot of tiny holes. Hal says, “That’s where they’ll be spraying the insulation in the next couple of days.” Then he walks us into the dining room-kitchen and directs the flashlight to the exposed brick. “Here, they’ll blow the insulation right between these studs. Then they’ll put up the drywall.”
“Oh, look at that,” Susan says, pointing across the room.
Hal swings the flashlight around. That’s right: since our dining room windows face our neighbors’, we’ve replaced them with glass block. Instead of clear views we have grids of refractors. They’re like crossword puzzles filled with squiggly letters that no one will ever read.
“That’s really nice,” Susan says. “You can’t see them and they can’t see you.”
“Yeah,” I say. “We still get the light from outside, too. Wow.”
“I thought you’d like it,” Hal says.
I also like how, as we walk around, there’s a lot more framing in preparation for the insulation and drywall. But otherwise, I must admit, things look much as they did at the start of the roughing-in. My house sickness hasn’t returned, but I can’t say I’m feeling excitement.
“Ooh,” Susan says as we continue through, “this is going to be great.”
I’m glad it’s dark, so she can’t see that I don’t share her emotions. I know many people feel a bond with their house, a sense of safety and pride in its embrace. But I can’t imagine how they get to that feeling. I can only hope that I will.
The next day, I call Laura one last time before her flight. Then I pull out the box of paint samples that Hal brought home from work, and try to put my mind to selecting our colors.
Many possibilities catch my eye as I thumb past dozens of pigment cards, so many that I think I can’t possibly narrow things down until Hal is sitting beside me. Then I see that I’ve actually skipped over a whole color family—orange—and I roll my eyes at myself. Orange is Rosalie’s favorite color, and I associate it so strongly with an emotionally ravaged time that I’ve always avoided orange. I know Hal will respect my disinterest, but just to play it safe, I remove all the samples from Avid Apricot to Organza and set them on the far side of the table.
There was a time when I saw orange as a completely acceptable color, as enticing as the blues and purples and reds to which I’m still drawn as I’m flipping through this box. That was back when I was a little girl, before Rosalie’s problems began with my father, and before the unhappiness she’d carried since she was a little girl became even harder for her to bear. In those days, I loved her as unreservedly as any child loves any mother. I would, with Laura, play dress-up in Rosalie’s clothes. A few years later, I would learn the Dewey Decimal system from her, walk through art galleries with her, sit by her side at Broad-way musicals. But she retreated from us as the divorce became final and loneliness and desperation overtook her, and then we found ourselves living wi
th our father and not knowing where in the world she might be. On the occasions when I tried to make sense of my baffling mother during her disappearance, I could find no answers except for one memory: I was six, and watching her fold laundry, when out of the blue she made a great sigh and said, “I never should have had children.” So that’s it, I told myself. Some people just shouldn’t have children, and my mother didn’t know that until it was too late. By the time I finished college, my mother had been reduced in my life to an aversion to orange and a phone number in my pocket. Now that she is again an actual presence, I still love her. But it is no longer the love that I think most adult children feel toward their mothers. It is love from behind a barrier. It is love smudged by history. Yet it is also a love that is both chill-resistant and warmth-retaining, sealed as it is by compassion.
This isn’t the way I wanted things to be when I called my mother after our six years apart, though I can’t say I had any picture of what I did want. I just wanted not to feel the hatred I’d been feeling, and then, when we met for the first time, I just wanted to survive dinner with some meager understanding of the woman before me. I hadn’t envisioned forgiving her.
But forgiveness, which dims the lights on one story, turns up the spotlight on the next. For us this meant that as I embarked on my new relationship with Rosalie, a trapeze effect began: I realized that I now had to be the mother, because she was still, at heart, a suffering child. I learned about her childhood then. In fact, the distant past was most of what we discussed, except for when we talked about the present—she couldn’t, I understood, face the years in between. So I decided to push aside my resentment and longing, learn to live with my irritation and disappointment, and let her, my mother-child, direct the show, and as she told me story after story, I learned much more about her life than she’d revealed when I’d lived with her: how she’d been raised in a first-floor apartment with a spineless father who couldn’t figure out a career, a caring mother who couldn’t stand up to her own mother, a demeaning uncle with a drinking problem, a grandfather dying of cancer, and both grandmothers, who were at each other’s throats. An only child lost in the crowd, Rosalie would look out the window at her neighbors, aching to go on picnics as they did, to be the loving family that she imagined them to be. But knowing that she could, at any moment, become the target of a family member’s misery, she committed herself to being inconspicuous. This sense of her own unimportance followed her into adulthood: she made no friends, had no passion to achieve, and was a novice when it came to good judgment. As the first years passed and I came to understand all of this, I acquired a sense of sympathy and forbearance. I did not entirely lose my more disagreeable feelings, but my new awareness made me choose not to give in to them. Thus I ceased hoping for a nurturing mother. Instead, I reached out to grasp the mother I had, and allowed her to hold on to me.
It has been in this spirit of upside-down love that I have kept up with Rosalie. Not that she would refuse any request I might make for motherly offerings like advice or solace—my mother is not hard-hearted or malevolent, and her door has been open to me for many years. But it doesn’t seem to cross her mind that she could solicit such requests. Nor has she ever suggested that we speak weekly or monthly, that I visit on holidays, or even, when she and Gordon moved to Florida soon after our reconnection, yearly. It just doesn’t appear to occur to her that when they take cross-country vacations, they could visit her kids at least as often as they visit lighthouses. There was a time when this apparent indifference upset me, yet I also felt, during the infrequent calls and visits, that she did love me, so I made yet another decision: I would view her behavior not as a lack of love, but as who she was. So for two decades now, when I call or visit Rosalie, I do so because I care about her, and know that she likes to see me. Unlike some friends in the secret club, I’ve also come to enjoy my time with my mother, particularly since she retired a few years ago. Her exit from the social pressures of the work world released her from daily awkwardness, and her new free time with Gordon, a cheerful, childless guy who dotes on her, came to make her feel, at long last, cherished. Even though her melancholy remains, it’s farther below the surface, and her smiles have become more genuine. I might even say that she has finally recovered, to the extent possible, from a life of pain. Although I came to feel in my early twenties that the name “Mom” conveyed emotions that contradicted the reality of the relationship, and although she welcomed my switching to “Rosalie,” we still look forward to our times together, and burst into tears when our visits end.
This is why Laura and I have had a hard time figuring out what’s going on. In fact, we didn’t realize anything was going on until one day last spring, when we were still mending our own relationship, and Laura said to me on the phone, “Have you heard from Rosalie lately?”
“Come to think of it,” I said, “it’s been way longer than usual.”
Laura, annoyed, said, “She never calls anymore. It’s like we don’t matter to her.”
“We don’t,” I said with a laugh.
Laura said, “I mean, I even sent her a really nice present for her birthday”—two weeks before—“and when I didn’t hear anything, I called. You know what she said? ‘Oh, what did you send? I must have put it somewhere.’ ” Laura, whose anger toward Rosalie is sometimes difficult for her to contain, blew out air hard, in disgust.
I then remembered that, also two weeks before, I’d sent Rosalie a videotape of the movie made from my book, weeks in advance of its air date, and I’d heard nothing from her.
I hung up with Laura and called my mother. As always, she was surprised to hear from me, as if any contact from her children came as a shock. We chatted pleasantly for a few minutes, and then I said, “We don’t hear much from you anymore.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, in a meek, apologetic voice.
“Are you annoyed with us?”
“No, no. I just”—her voice trailed off, then returned—“I just never think about it.”
I chose not to let this bother me, and said, “Well, Laura was concerned when—”
“I know, I know, she was very annoyed with me for not telling her that I got her present.”
“She was worried it got lost in the mail.”
“I know. I should have called her.”
Then, thinking I was only checking on something else that might have gotten mishandled by the post office, I said, “Actually, did you get something I sent recently?”
“You sent something?”
“Yes? A package?” When she said nothing, I added, “The movie of my book?”
She said, “Your book? . . . Oh, a book . . . It was about Beth, wasn’t it? Something about her riding buses? . . . It’s so nice that you wrote a book about her . . . I wonder where it is . . .”
I got off the phone and stared at the wall in my study. It stared back, blank as a page without words. Yet I knew what I was seeing.
I called Laura back. “I think something’s wrong,” I said. “I do, too,” she said. Immediately dumping any remaining tension between us, Laura and I opened up right then, poured together all the questions we’d begun asking ourselves, and decided on the spot that we had to be united. From that moment on, we’ve been a team, facing this frontier together.
Now I glance at the orange paint samples, set far away from me in one big fist of color. In the apricots and tangerines I see my mother’s face, finally truly smiling, and I think about how she at last has the affection and security that every person deserves. But if Laura’s eyes confirm what we already feel—what we already know—then Rosalie is about to lose everything that took her seven decades to gain. “It’s not fair!” we used to say when we were little. “Life’s not fair,” she would reply. It always just seemed like something she said, not a truth with a lifelong echo.
“There they are,” Hal says the next day as we get out of our car in front of the old house, dressed in work clothes. “Pennsylvania fieldstone. Three and a half pallets.”
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br /> “They look like ordinary gray and tan rock.”
“They are, if you’re in a field in Pennsylvania.”
The pallets, bound with wire netting, contain rocks ranging in size from oven mitts to dinner trays. They’re rectangular, triangular, and teardrop-shaped—“with ragged edges,” I say.
Hal says, “Squared-off edges are used for more formal, mortared walls.”
“Wait—we’re not going to have mortar?”
“This is a dry stone wall. If we lay it right, gravity will hold it together.”
“Are you kidding?”
“The dry stone walls throughout the Northeast were built three hundred years ago, and they’re holding up fine.”
“I guess my knowledge of walls is a bit limited.”
“You just haven’t noticed what’s out there. But trust me, this’ll work.”
“If we survive building it.”
“I’ve already started. Look.”
I follow him into the alley, which is so slender it prevents us from walking abreast, then ascend the two steps to our new concrete patio. The backyard beyond is filled with a huge pile of dirt. We will, Hal explains, be laying our wall in the trench he’s been digging between the patio and yard, which is where the dirt came from. I’m impressed, and while I squeeze his biceps and make Arnold Schwarzenegger jokes, Hal remains serious. The wall will be three feet high and eighteen feet long, and will separate the patio from the soon-to-be-flattened yard. He’ll also need to sort the stones by size, since the largest go on the bottom. He’ll also need to measure and lay steps into the yard as the wall goes up. Though for now he needs to keep shoveling.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Cut the wire around the stones.” He points to a pair of tools: tin snips, he says. I notice other tools like a level and mallet. “Then get the stones down the alley to me, and I’ll sort them.”
