by Molly Giles
“No, Kay. Nothing helps with pain. But you can’t tell Francis that. He’s always trying to find ways to make me feel better. Sometimes I’ll see him looking at me and his look is so sweet it makes me want to cry. I’ll pretend to read or be asleep because I know I don’t deserve a look like that. Old cripple. He’ll be better off when I’m gone.” Ida’s eyes circled the room, rested, at last, on the vanity mirror. “You all will. If I had any courage at all I’d …” She stopped talking and made a jerky slice at her stomach with the flat of her hand. “Like Duffy Sinclair. Did you know it’s okay to kill yourself now? Father Bliss says suicides can go to heaven and be buried in a churchyard like everyone else. And oh darling, I hate to ask you—but Francis has to go out of town Wednesday night, his investment club is meeting up north and he has to give a presentation and can’t get out of it. And Greta can’t stay over and I’ll need someone here. Can you baby-sit me?”
“All night?”
“Dear Kay.” Ida closed her eyes against the pillow. “Tell me, does Neal still take you to the symphony? When you first told us you were going to marry him, Francis said, ‘Well at least he takes her to the symphony.’ Greta,” she said, opening her eyes and smiling as Greta came in to clear the tray, “you cheated. You put egg in that soup.”
“I just put in a little egg, missus, mixed up with some flour. No Cream of Wheat. Just flour. That is how we do it in Germany.”
“It was delicious.” Ida closed her eyes again. “Now why don’t you turn me. I’ll try not to scream.”
“Why would you scream?” Kay asked.
“Because it hurts, dum-dum. Why do you think? Look, Kay, I don’t want you in here. You’ll just get in the way. Why don’t you go play the piano.”
Dismissed, Kay left the bedroom. But I don’t want to play the piano, she thought. She saw the lunch Greta had set out for Francis on the dining room table—two tuna sandwiches in plastic wrap, a cup turned upside down in its saucer for coffee, a small bag of potato chips, and an orange, already peeled, drying crustily under the skylight. The afternoon paper was turned to the crossword puzzle and the gold pen lay beside it. It made an efficient and sterile composition, a picture of frugality and loneliness, and was surely more indicative of Francis’s daily life than any sexy lunch he might be having with Zabeth passing bags of pot back and forth under a tippy table at the Dark Moon Grill. Oh what had Ida meant when she’d said “Don’t fuck your father”? What an ugly thought. How hard it must be being Ida. How hard it was to be around her at all. Poor Dad. No wonder he had an affair. But so long ago! Before Victor was born? Before Ida tripped on the toys and took her first fall?
Maybe Dad will feel freer when she’s gone, Kay thought. Maybe he will be happier, more relaxed. Friendlier. He might come to dinner and take walks with us and go on picnics on Sundays. We might even travel, he and I, the two of us, alone. We might go to Ephesus. She saw herself on a cruise ship, standing at the rail in a windblown white dress, her arm in her father’s, both of them laughing … Such a good daughter, she heard other passengers saying. Such a comfort to him.
She shook her head and walked quickly to the piano. As she settled herself on the bench she heard a scuffling sound from the bedroom followed by a scream so uncontrolled that she trembled and hugged herself, one hand at her mouth. Brute, she thought of Greta, but she knew it wasn’t Greta, Greta was doing the best she could. It was Ida, Ida’s body, broken and still breaking, burnt with radiation, bursting with bedsores. She reached up and riffled through the sheets of music on top of the old piano. The scream rose again and her fingers tumbled onto the keys with a clamor.
She played for an hour, badly, passionately; she played all of Scott Joplin’s rags and Mozart Made Easy and the “Theme from Exodus”—anything to block out the terrible sounds of that woman who had been in pain, in the bedroom, for almost as long as she could remember.
· · ·
“When will you learn?” Neal asked. She had stopped by his shop on her way home from Ida’s and sat huddled in her raincoat in his back room, morosely trying to sip the herbal tea he had made for her on his hot plate. It was green and smelled like a mouse nest. “Your mother always gets to you,” Neal lectured. “It’s like every time you meet her is the first time you’ve met her.”
“That’s not so bad. What’s wrong with that? It sounds Zen. You don’t have any whiskey do you?” Kay asked.
Neal didn’t answer. His thick hair was ruffled and he had draped a crocheted shawl over his sloped shoulders. He looked like a grandmother. He had been bent over an envelope of papers when she first came in but had moved it aside; she got only a glimpse of a familiar name, Dominic Delgardo, stamped hugely on letterhead, before he shoved the papers into a drawer. “Who’s that who keeps writing you?” she had asked, expecting no answer and getting none. Neal’s secret life, one mystery after another. Still, the touch of his hand on her wrist was welcome, even though he had found and was rubbing a new bruise, and his eyes, as he regarded her, were quiet, ready to receive what she had to give. Which wasn’t much. The usual muddle. Neal, pressing down a final time on her bruise, rose and began to busy himself at the worktable. The rain continued. His favorite radio talk show droned on. What was the subject today? She tried to catch a word. “Potassium.” The subject today was “potassium.” If you ate a banana a day instead of an apple a day you would live longer. Well: good. Living longer was good. Wasn’t it?
“I saw Father Bliss today,” she said after a while. “He was driving up the hill as I was coming down. Big, tan, white-haired guy in a Cadillac. He looked confused, as if he couldn’t remember the address. Mom says he’s able to cast out demons.”
Neal looked up from the photograph he was matting. “Who’s Father Bliss, hon?”
“Oh Neal.” She slid off the table, walked to the sink, and poured her tea down the drain. “What should I do?”
“About what?”
“Us. Them. Me.”
She came up behind him and put her arms around his waist. His body felt slight, bent, soft. She looked at the blown-up photograph he was matting. “What’s this?”
“West Valley in 1926. This is what the stables looked like then. Here’s where the shop is now. And the old theater. And Moriarty’s Emporium. And look at the railroad station. People came for miles to shop here. This place was a hub. And it could be again.”
Kay followed his finger across the brown and white paper, taking in the boxy wooden buildings, the wide main street, the woman with the parasol, the boy in knickers. That could have been her and Nicky years ago. “So,” she said, trying to understand. “You want to re-create the past?”
“I’d like to salvage some of the good things from it, yes.”
“Like us?” She met his blank look. “Remember when I used to come in here and meet you? You’d lock the front door, turn the CLOSED sign to the street, take the phone off the hook?”
“Lost a lot of business,” Neal conceded.
“You didn’t use to care about business.” Kay walked to a stack of prints and began leafing through them. The same old rock stars—Janis, Stevie, Grace—mixed in with the same old romantic stuff—Pre-Raphaelite nymphs with red hair and curled lips. Neal’s idealized women didn’t have much to do with the moody matron in a stained raincoat she had somehow turned into. She paused, eyes narrowed on a Chagall bride and bridegroom. She had just had an idea. “Want to go away? Take off for a few days? Nicky could spend the night at a friend’s house and you and I could drive up the coast, like we used to, just the two of us, have dinner at a little inn, spend the night.”
“What for?” Neal said.
“I don’t know—conversation. Food. Romance.” She paused. “Sex.”
Neal shook his head. “I don’t think so … Now what are you suddenly so mad about? Where are you going?”
“I’m leaving you. I meant to do it last November after the concert. Why didn’t I? What happened? I can’t believe we ever got married and had a son.”
“Don’t tell me what I’m doing. Look at what you’re doing. You’re the one who is making me spiral.”
“I can’t keep up with you,” Neal said. “You just asked if we could go away next weekend and I said I didn’t think so because I had too much work to do.”
“Is that what you said?”
“Yes.”
“Is that what you think happened?”
“Yes.”
“No. Neal. No. What happened is that I propositioned you and you rejected me. Like you always do. So what is the point of being married to someone who always rejects you? What am I doing being married to you at all?”
“If you’d calm down—”
“I can’t calm down. If I calmed down I’d be like you. I’d be dead. Oh, listen. There’s the doorbell. Can you believe it? You actually have a customer. Now maybe you will have too much to do.” She spun on her heel, slipped, caught herself, and strode shakily toward the front door. At the threshold of the workroom she stopped. “You don’t even take me to the symphony anymore.”
Neal lifted his palms. “What is that supposed to mean?”
She gulped back a surge of tears and gripped her shoulder bag to stop it from slamming against her hip as she hurried out. Even so she brushed against the man who had just come in. She tugged at the front door and his hand fell on hers.
“It’s a little stuck,” he said. She looked up. Chocolate-dropeyes. A gap between the two front teeth. Sunburn on the rosy cheeks. It must have been sunny in Mexico. Or Tahiti. Or wherever he’d been.
“That de Koonig book came in,” she said.
He lifted his eyebrows, said nothing.
“The one you ordered last summer.”
“Oh. De Kooning.”
“Is that how you pronounce it? Well. It’s on the Reserve Shelf. So whenever you want to come pick it up.”
“How about Thursday?”
“Thursday’s fine.”
“At four?”
“Four?”
“It’s a date.”
And she was out on the street in the rain again with tears in her eyes and a grin on her face and her mother’s scream in her ears and Neal’s puzzled face in her mind and the heat of Charles Lichtman’s brown hand on hers. It was no wonder, overloaded as she was, that she dropped her keys into a puddle by the side of the car and had to kneel in the street to retrieve them; the wonder was, as a truck driver shouted down, that she wasn’t run over and killed on the spot.
Nine
“Want to come?” she asked Nicky Wednesday night. “I could use the company.”
“No way.” Nicky lay on the floor pedaling Pokey up and down with the soles of his feet. “I don’t like the wind at Grandmère’s,” he explained. “And it’s always cold.”
And you’re afraid of the dog, Kay thought. And the people. And you ought to be. As soon as it stops raining, she promised herself, I will take Nicky on a long holiday. We’ll go to Disneyland or a dinosaur park, someplace simple and sunny. We’ll eat watermelon and ride roller coasters. Charles Lichtman might come with us. “What do you think?” She held up her too-tight red sweater and her too-low black sweater for her son’s inspection. They were the sexiest tops she owned and she was determined to dazzle Charles Lichtman with one of them when he came in for his art book Thursday.
“Neither,” growled Nicky. “I like this one.” He pulled her brown sweater with the hood out of the drawer and handed it to her.
“Oh yick,” she said, “that makes me look like Friar Tuck,” but she packed it, along with the other two. Neal passed by the door, a stooped shadow. He had forgotten she was going to spend the night with her mother and when she’d reminded him he’d blinked and said, “Why? You’ve got your own family.” “Do I?” she’d snapped, not sure what she meant exactly, only feeling, wildly: I don’t have anything of my own. Neal had retreated, and the look he shot her now was hangdog with hurt.
“Would you please just tell me what’s bothering you?” Kay asked, her voice harsh and impatient.
“Nothing.”
He did not say goodbye, and frankly, Kay thought, as she kissed Nicky and slipped out through the rain with her backpack, I don’t care. He can go to hell. I’m going to marry Charles Lichtman and he and I and Nicky are going to talk and laugh so much we’re going to need throat lozenges before breakfast.
“I don’t like pain,” Francis said. “All it does is hurt you.” He opened the refrigerator and showed Kay a plastic beaker of yellowish fluid. “So when she starts to feel bad I give her this. We call it the Stuff. It’s something this fellow Garret cooks up. Probably illegal. I don’t ask. It does the trick, so don’t you ask either. She guzzles it like gin.”
“What’s it made out of?”
“God knows. Eye of newt and bat blood. Now these,” he continued, shaking out a handful of pink, blue, and white pills and arranging them around the saucer of a rosebud demitasse, “are just your ordinary opiates. Tonight she gets extra because of her arm.”
“What arm?”
“Her broken arm.”
“How did she break her arm?”
“The usual.” Francis set a shot glass of Scotch in the corner of the tray, picked it up, and carried it into the bedroom. “Here’s your junk, junkie,” he said to Ida.
Ida opened her eyes, smiled, and closed them again. “They get heroines in English,” she said.
“No one knows what you’re talking about.” Francis set the tray down, his voice even.
“She means,” Kay translated, “that junkies in England get heroin.”
“Lucky stiffs,” Ida corroborated.
“Glad you two understand each other,” Francis said. “Because you’re both too clever for me. I’m out of here. I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon. Kay will stay with you all night, dear, and Greta will be here bright and early. So you’re not to fear. Comprenezvous?”
“Wee, wee.” Ida smiled, eyes closed.
“Good.” Francis bent and kissed her forehead. He wiggled his fingers goodbye at Kay and stepped swiftly out of the bedroom. His light steps paused at the dog’s cage. “Don’t let anyone bite you,” Kay heard him tell Coco. Then he was out the kitchen door and into the Porsche and out of the driveway.
She was alone for the night with her mother.
Ida looked awful. Something had happened these last few days. Maybe it was only that she was not wearing her diamond earrings or bright red lipstick—but Kay knew it was more than that. The face on the pillow was small and damp and swollen as a lump of clay. Ida’s smile shrank the minute Francis left and she let out a quick exhalation, as if she’d been holding her breath. Putting on a show for Dad still, Kay realized. And he still doesn’t know it. She looked for a place to sit, found none, and perched on the edge of the wheelchair. Always the fear that if she relaxed into the chair, she would never get out. That she’d have to stay there forever. She pulled the cuticle she was gnawing out of her mouth and wiped it hastily on her jeans.
“Dad said you broke your arm.”
“Oh. Is it broken? They didn’t tell me that. Could I have some pills now, darling?”
“What color?”
“One of each, please.”
Ida opened her mouth and Kay placed the pills on her tongue. She waved the Scotch away but took the water Kay offered in tiny sips.
Kay watched her, concerned. “Is it hard for you to swallow?”
“Everything’s hard.” Ida lay quiet, collecting herself. Then, “Did Francis tell you what Jim Deeds thinks is wrong with me? He thinks I’m immature.” She opened her pale lips to smile and her white teeth gleamed. “He thinks I’m the most immature nineteen-year-old he’s ever treated.”
“He likes you,” Kay said.
“Oh yes. I think so. So tell me. How’s your marriage?”
“My marriage? You’ve never asked about my marriage before.”
“I’m asking now.”
�
��My marriage is terrible. I’m going to leave Neal and file for divorce.”
“Is there someone else?”
“No. Sort of. A man I don’t even know.”
“It’s our fault,” Ida said. “We should have paid more attention to you.” She seemed to sleep for a moment, then in the same quiet voice, said, “Don’t get a divorce. Give old Stick-in-the-Mud another chance. Try that marriage encounter Victor talks about.”
Kay tried to unwring her hands, which had flown into automatic prayer position at the word “marriage.” “Neal isn’t into encounters.”
“Then you ought to go.”
“Alone?”
“I did such a stupid thing,” Ida murmured. “I thought I could walk.” Then she was silent again. She seemed to be truly asleep this time.
Kay, shaken, looked around the bedroom. A lamp was on by the window, throwing a yellow glow against the dark glass. Blankets and sheets and sheepskin pads were folded in piles on the floor. The vanity and the nightstand were cluttered with medicine bottles, cosmetics, jewelry, more roses from Glo, and books. So many books—junk novels, classics, biographies, how-to books, mysteries, Beginning French, the Bible, volumes of poetry. No wonder I work in a library, Kay thought. I grew up in one. She rose and walked around, trying to be quiet. For a long time she studied the familiar photographs on the dresser: Francis and Ida at their wedding, sleek and elegant, both holding cigarettes; Victor in his Boy Scout uniform; herself at age seven seated at a white Steinway for her first recital; the paired pictures of Nicky as a baby and Coco as a puppy in matched silver frames. No photos of Stacy. None of Neal. She turned as Ida stirred and opened her eyes.
“Know any good jokes?” Ida’s face was still pale, but mischievous now, expectant.
Kay, caught off guard, said, “No. Only one bad one: What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?”
“I give up.”
“‘Make me one with everything.’”
“Explain it, darling.”
“It’s … Buddhist. I’m going to pour this Scotch back into the bottle. Do you want anything from the kitchen?”
