by Austin Bunn
I set the basket down in the truck bed and wonder what the girl will make of it. Will she see the bounty of the Jersey coast, or just me, a forty-one-year-old woman, alone and childless, her diseased mother for a best friend? I am her future. I want to tell her that after their marriage ends—after he cheats, or spends his days stoned, or gambling, or gets up from the table when she asks him for a child—she should pass the shells right on down to the next girl. Souvenirs from what happens later.
She peels the money from a roll as thick as her fist. “We don’t want your basket,” she says.
“Good,” I say, taking it back. “Because I don’t like your look.”
Dr. Stecopoulos is Greek, in his midthirties, and my mother adores him. Every time we’ve met, he seems as if he’s just come from an exam that he knows he’s aced. He patiently allows my mother to pry into his parents’ immigration, his years of school, his new marriage. After every detail, my mother throws a look in my direction: Thessaloníki! Isn’t Thessaloníki wonderful? He is my mother’s ideal man at a time when her interactions have become transactional. He has warm hands, walks her to the reception desk. He wears patent leather Italian shoes (“He doesn’t skimp,” my mother said), and tolerates her jokes, the signal flares of her personality.
She has her legs up in the stirrups, holding her breath, with her hands crossed over her belly. Dr. Stecopoulos probes indistinctly under the paper gown while I perch on a stool by his desk. A bluish plastic model of a uterus rests next to the computer monitor, and it looks drained and baleful, as if it doesn’t belong in the light. A little door is open in the front, a dollhouse entrance. What’s inside? A pink secret. I could crawl in and rest.
“Well, you were right,” the doctor says. “This is definitely lichen sclerosis.” He pokes his head up from under the gown. “Do you want to take a look?”
“Ah, no thank you,” I say.
“He wasn’t talking to you,” my mother says. He positions a mirror for her to see. I don’t want to look, not even by accident. My phone says I have a message from Scott. He got the papers too. The end is here, and I’m sure he wants to talk. I fiddle with the uterus model. The tiny door in front will not close properly, and I want it closed, in place.
“Have you been sexually active?” Dr. Stecopoulos asks.
“No,” I say. “She definitely has not.”
My mother remains quiet, staring up at the ceiling.
“Edith?” the doctor asks.
“Mom?” I ask.
She closes her eyes and sighs. “Yes,” she says.
The tiny door snaps off in my hand. “What? With who?” I ask.
“I don’t need to know that information,” Dr. Stecopoulos says. “But you will need to tell all your sexual partners.” He delivers this line as if it were plausible that my mother had a sexual partner. My mother is seventy-one. She is in menopause; there is no menoplay. Then he tells her she’ll need to apply a steroid cream to her labia—I see the zincky, frosted lips of skiers—and he writes her a prescription.
“With these steroids,” my mother asks, dressing, “will my labia become stronger?”
“Gross,” I say, and hand Dr. Stecopoulos the door to the uterus. It looks like the piece that covers a battery compartment on a remote, the part that inevitably breaks. “I think I messed up your model.”
Dr. Stecopoulos has no idea what I’m talking about.
“Your uterus,” I say. “I broke it.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he says. “My uterus broke a long time ago.”
My mother pats his hand. “You’re not missing anything.”
In the car, my mother hunts desperately in her purse for Coffee Nips, as though she were the person I remember her being. “I need your support right now,” she says.
“Fine,” I say. “But I’m allowed to say, ‘Ew.’”
She closes her eyes, leans back against the headrest, and sucks on her candy with deep delight. She’s wearing the clip-on sunglasses I bought for her and a white sport fleece, collar up. I notice now that she got dressed up for the doctor visit in gold, drapey pants and sapphire blouse from Shine Daughters!—a fashion catalog she loves, even though it’s for African American women—on the off chance that Dr. Stecopoulos would run away with her. The poignancy of my mother’s life is that she still thinks people are looking at her, for guidance, for fashion tips. On her bureau, she keeps a framed photo of herself as a teenager in the Atlantic City parade: a red-haired mermaid on a papier-mâché splash, gazing upon the crowd with a royal look. When I was a girl, after she divorced my father and went feminist and vegetarian—Oh my God, the lentils, the antinuke walkabouts, the woven totes of my youth—I used to stare at that photo and wish for it to come alive, for her to invite me up onto the float. I ached to be her so badly I made her bookmarks with declarations of love. As a girl, I would watch her leave to go jogging, braless and single and alive, and wait patiently with her pack of cigarettes for when she returned.
Now she uses a cane, tucked next to her in the passenger seat; she’s used it irregularly since her foot surgery, and I know it humiliates her. Men seem almost regal with canes. But women are expected to keep their balance forever. Dime-sized freckles blot her skin, the star chart of her body gaining constellations yearly. A youth spent at the shore is catching up with my mother.
She smiles. This doctor visit has given her a sense of drama, an urgency that cuts a path through the hours. Other times, she can spend a day moving bills around.
“What are you looking at?” she asks.
“I’m trying to see you how your lover sees you,” I say.
“Oh, please.” She scratches at the corner of her mouth. “I’m starving, and I need my prescription.”
“I have to get home,” I say. “I have more people coming.”
“Good,” she says. “There’s a Quick Check near you.”
When my mother married my father, she was a good Catholic girl, a virgin. “Mistake number one,” she told me once. “I hadn’t even been down there yet.” She divorced my father thirty years ago, and somewhere in her apartment is a photo-album of all her boyfriends since: Val, the therapist; Devon, my elementary school teacher; and the ape with sideburns who worked in the anthropology department at the college. As we drive, I’m bothered, I realize, by the thought that someone finds my mother attractive. I feel excluded.
“It’s Al, isn’t it?” I say. Al, the retired ship’s captain, who wears blue khakis and a little anchor pin on his cardigan. Al, who plies her with highballs and Manhattans at dusk. He has furry Popeye forearms and a dimly lit Pacific backstory. I picture him on top of my mother, gritting his teeth and thrusting upward, like a ship cresting a wave.
“Wasn’t it funny how you broke the uterus?” my mother says.
“Just tell me if it’s Al,” I say.
She adjusts an air vent. “You should know that he is very gentle,” she says. “And appreciative. He understands a woman’s body.”
I shiver. My mother can’t bend over and instead has to spread her legs and squat. Her skin itches constantly, a side effect of her Parkinson’s medication. She keeps a back scratcher in her car and another, the telescoping kind, in her purse for emergencies. She can eat a half gallon of ice cream for dinner. People like her should not be having sex; sex is the reward for not eating a half gallon of ice cream.
“What’s your problem?” she says. “You want so badly to judge me.”
“I’m just surprised,” I say. “Surprised and worried about you.”
She gazes out the window as if she hasn’t heard me. “It’s not too late for you,” she says. “You’ve been separated from Scott for long enough. It’s time to meet new people.”
“I’m not ready.”
“What about that one I showed you?” she says. “The guy from the Internet?” She has taken to trolling the Craigslist personals for me, trying to matchmake. She’ll call and read me the postings: “He says he’ll be at the Harborside having a d
rink for the next hour. I’ll go by and check him out for you.” No! Or: “This one says he likes Bruce Springsteen.” We live in New Jersey; that’s redundant! She is unable to understand that Craigslist is where people sell their junk, including their personalities. No genuine, non-pot-smoking, non-gambling, non-fucking-a-twenty-five-year-old-teacher’s-aide-at-your-school man will let the universe know he’s having a drink at the Harborside. It’s an SOS from the bottom of the dating pool.
“There is no ‘guy from the Internet,’ and there will never be,” I say, my pronouncement punctuated by the speed bump at the entrance to my parking lot. Outside my garage, a man leans against the trunk of a Mercedes convertible. His legs are crossed, and while he talks on his cell phone, he digs at his molars with a pinkie. He’s dressed in the Manhattan palette: charcoal pants, a black short-sleeve dress shirt, and ribbony sandals that make his feet look bloodless. No wedding ring. I park and he finishes his call. “What about him?” my mother whispers as I bound out to meet him.
“You’re fifteen minutes late,” he says. “I thought you were going to be a no-show.”
“I’m sorry. My mother had a doctor’s appointment.”
“That’s me!” My mother waves the palm of the back scratcher from the passenger seat.
“I’m just here for the baby shit,” he says.
I throw open the garage door and point. The “baby shit” is in the back, where I could throw a blanket over it and pretend it was a mountain in the distance. I have a bassinet, baby chair, stroller, and play “environment.” When Scott and I were trying for kids, I made the mistake of accepting all of this from friends who had had their children, who were done having them. But I never got pregnant. Scott refused to get a fertility test because it was “annoying,” then “expensive,” then finally “against his religion,” the religion of morning bong loads, apparently. My fallopian tubes weren’t cooperating either; maybe they knew better. When I moved out, I wasn’t quite ready to see it all go, not because I hadn’t given up on kids—I’m fine, don’t pity me. My first night in the apartment, my mattress pinched at the back of the moving van, I laid out the play environment and fell asleep in it. I slept historically well.
He pulls back the blanket as if uncovering a body in a morgue. “How much for everything?” He is driving a fifty-thousand-dollar car and buying thirdhand baby furniture. I don’t press.
“I’ll take seventy-five,” I say.
“Done,” he says. On his way out with the stroller, he picks up the biggest shell in the basket. It’s a fan the size of a dinner plate and bleach white. “You giving these away?” he says.
I found that shell one night when Scott and I were fooling around under a pier. I had taken a black-and-white photography class—I wanted a hobby, it seemed validating—and we’d gone there to fill out my portfolio. Scott was high and determined to go down on me, but first I made him pose. Afterwards, I plucked the shell from the sand, an amateur naturalist. The photographs, though, were bad, dark, and indistinct.
“Sorry,” I say. “Keepsake.” Before, I was eager to give the shells away. But now I don’t want this man to have them.
He picks up a mottled brown and pink conch, flawless. “What about this one?” he asks, and I’m back in the tide, our first summer together, bonfire on the beach. “Look what I found,” I said to Scott, and he pulled me to him. “Look what I found,” he whispered, and squeezed my hips.
I don’t want these memories.
“Look, you can find all these shells on the beach,” I say.
“I don’t have time for the beach,” says the man with the convertible.
I won’t relent, and he shrugs. I help him with the stroller. It fits sideways, recklessly, in his passenger seat, ready to launch.
“It seems like you’re shedding,” he says.
“Shedding?” I say, irritated.
“You should call me,” he says. “I’m a therapist. I see things.” He jabs a business card out between two fingers.
I tell him I’m good, and he answers, “Suit yourself.”
My mother remains in the passenger seat, a heap of Coffee Nip wrappers in her lap. “He seemed like a hot prospect,” she says, his car revving out into the street.
“He just bought baby stuff off Craigslist,” I say. “Not a prospect.”
“Well, you sold it there,” she says.
My phone has four messages: two cancellations and two from Scott.
My mother and I buy burritos at the Quick Check and pick up her prescription at Walgreens, but the fact of the two items, the vaginal steroid and our food now in the same bag, erases my appetite. On her balcony, with its sweeping view of the parking lot, I watch her chew her carefully managed bites. My mother has one brave molar left. A heavy breeze brushes the plants and lifts our napkins.
“You need to call Al,” I say, fetching the phone. “He could be a vector.”
“You love me vulnerable,” she says. “It makes you feel whole.”
“I’m being cautious,” I say. “I’m being you.” How true and how awful that is. There must be a place in between parent and child, a way to take care of each other without resentment and hating yourself.
“Well, stop,” she says, and stands unsteadily. “Don’t be me. Nobody should be me.” She walks inside without her cane, lurching from one piece of furniture to another. One of the sad aspects of getting older, I think, is that you lose control over the quality of your entrances and exits. She sits on the couch, in the dark, and I hear her dial and leave a message for Al. A small happiness, the satisfaction of someone following instructions, rises in me.
“What happened?” I call to her.
“Leave me alone.”
“What? He’s not there?”
“He does his power walking on Saturdays,” she says. “Why don’t you go upstairs to happy hour, to the bar?” She wants to shower and apply her salve in private. I’m happy to leave and take the good magazines with me.
When the elevator door opens into the Penthouse Lounge, I feel as if I’m stepping onto the pleasure deck of a 1970s cruise ship, all aquamarine and pink extravagance, smelling vaguely of pizza dough and shrimp cocktail, the aroma of recent fun. I pull a chair to the floor-to-ceiling window. At this hour, the building’s shadow stretches way out into the Atlantic. Scott and I came up here just once, right after my mother moved in, and he pointed out the whole sweep, from the Palisades to the knobby tip of Long Island. He knew the geography. Below, Sandy Hook arcs out toward Manhattan. The people on it are just dots of color; maybe one is collecting shells, trying to hold the afternoon still. I could call Scott.
I should call Scott.
Living at the beach was his idea. I’d thought of other places for us—Philadelphia, Hoboken—but he wanted to sit at the beach in the sun and think and “see what surfaced.” Here I am, at the top floor, doing it without him. What we take from each other, without knowing. I remember Sundays, he’d prop his fishing pole up in the sand, park himself in a lawn chair, and stare out at the water, watching night come. Once, near the end, I showed him a perfect nautilus I’d found. He palmed it. “This used to be something’s house,” he said with an emphasis that told me he was high, long after he’d promised to stop. “A house, until something died.” And I saw the curl of emptiness inside the shell and it was all I could see. All that armor protecting a darkness, really, an ending.
The elevator dings, and old men in baseball caps and windbreakers spill out. They discover me alone at the window and give me a wide berth. I’m probably some fantasy they’ve all had: the teary girl in the penthouse bar. They begin stretching on the floor, their legs up on tables, flexing. Not one has broken a sweat. It’s impossible to tell if they’re about to leave or are finishing up. I recognize Al in a yellow tracksuit and spotless white sneakers. His headphone-radio, a novelty of twenty years ago, loops around his neck. He smiles, and all I can see is complicated dentistry.
“You need to talk to my mother,” I say to him.
>
He looks concerned, almost as if he cared. “What’s the matter?”
“She’ll tell you about it.”
“Is she hurt?”
“She’s . . . coping,” I say, righteous and inviolable. I am her daughter. I have her interests at heart.
“I’ll do that,” he says with chronic gentlemanliness. I smell a peppery gust of aftershave, cologne, and sweat. When he asks if I’m all right, I huff at him. He backs away, giving me my space, except now I don’t want it.
“Look, I just want you to take responsibility for your actions,” I call out. He’s bent over now, fingers about three feet from touching his toes. Al cranes himself out of position, his hands on his lower back, and comes back.
“Do you love her?” I ask. His eyebrows furrow.
“Your mother and I are good friends.”
“Friends with benefits?”
“Benefits?” he says, confused. “Like life insurance?”
The other men whisper to each other. The words boil out of me. “Oh, don’t play dumb. What is this place? Some kind of sex castle?” The others step toward the elevator. I know I look insane, but I’m right. If I’m not having sex, they’re not allowed to either.
Al sighs. “Your mother told me about you, what you’re going through.”
Of course she told him. She used me to get him. Because that’s what mothers do: they get us to run errands with them, wait patiently with cigarettes, take notes at the doctor’s. And then use our sadness as a story, as a friendship appetizer.
