In Case We're Separated

by Alice Mattison

  “Forget it.” The house was old, and tattered rubber mats were nailed to the stairs. Eric tripped and scrambled, recovering himself, and I took his arm. We made our way down the stairs like an elderly couple, the old parents banished from the happy table for bitterness and sorrow. I opened the front door and we stepped onto the little wooden porch. The air was cold and pleasant. Elijah was visiting at the house across the street, too—or else those people just didn’t bother to keep their front door closed.

  “You can close it now,” came a voice from upstairs. “Come back!”

  But Eric withdrew something from his jacket pocket: Tibby’s red yo-yo.

  I gave a cry, then said, “Where did you get it?” I grasped it as if it were holy, an object sacred to my people—as if Eric didn’t know what he had—and closed my hand around it.

  “He left it in the office. I found it, weeks later, under a pile of papers.”

  “And you kept it? You carry it around? And you’d give it to me?” I slowly understood that if Eric had it at that moment, he had it all the time.

  “Yes.”

  I kissed him on the lips. Across the street, the house door was still open. I wanted to see someone come and close it. Waiting, in my mind I found a rough map of Greater Boston, with house doors open here and there. Beyond Boston, all through New England, some people opened a door for Elijah. It was an intrinsically good act, I decided, to open a door, now and then, to Elijah. “Everywhere are Jewish people,” my grandmother used to say. In New York and New Jersey—my mind moved down the coast, omitting and then restoring Long Island—more open doors. If Elijah or anyone else cared to enter, that was temporarily possible. Eric, who stood behind me, flung an arm over my shoulder and across my body, so his elbow collided with my breast and his hand grasped my arm. “Come on,” he said, turning me around. We lingered a moment longer, while the door still stood open to the cold spring air, then climbed the stairs to the noisy dining room, where illicit cake had been served. Eric and I sat down to eat cake and praise God some more—God who could move the ocean aside, but mostly didn’t.

  Future House

  Joan Applebaum, executive director of Future House—a nonprofit organization in New Haven offering mental health services to poor women—had provided coffee and cookies for the meeting of her board, though sugar and caffeine made the members quarrelsome, and Joan, who was taller and fatter than any of them, was trying to lose weight. Maybe they paid attention to her because of her size: their argument paused when she spoke, but then she was interrupted by a man’s testy voice, coming from outside the window. “I’m gonna work my way out of the hole,” the man said mysteriously, “not in.”

  Workers were restoring broken stucco. Now that the landlord was improving the building, he wanted more rent than Joan’s organization could pay. The workers had erected scaffolding all over the old gray structure (a grand house originally, later a funeral home) and they climbed from one wooden platform to another, like children in a playground designed to encourage the imagination. They appeared at windows, or were abruptly audible. Joan did not like exceptions to the usual rules about windows and doors, about up and down. Outside the window hung the thick torso of a woman in tight denim shorts, girded by a leather belt full of tools. A hand held a cigarette. Joan could see a belly button, an innie. A hammer she couldn’t see tapped on the wall. Nails were being driven through the stucco into the brick under it, to hold wire mesh in place. The workers would then spread new stucco on the wire.

  As the meeting continued, Joan could hear clients hurry children on the wide staircases. The mothers sounded mentally healthy but exasperated. The board, which had eaten all the cookies, was also exasperated. Nobody wanted to give up the old-fashioned, breezy corridors and high-ceilinged rooms just as the cracks were filled and the walls straightened. The dilapidated building seemed to soothe, whispering of excess: air, windows. Plenty, the old building lied, there’s plenty.

  Pete, the associate director, a small man with strong opinions, had been touring places they could rent. He spread a map on the conference table—an old map, no doubt from his glove compartment. A fold was torn just at a street where two available buildings stood. Pete tried to line the sections up properly, leaning over the table and stretching his arm across, a long white sleeve from which a light brown hand protruded. But the map was confusing, and Pete started in the middle of any topic. “Obviously—” he began, somewhat pugnaciously. One building was expensive; the other might not be available after all.

  “Apples, peaches, strawberries, blackberries, blueberries . . .” came another voice from outside.

  Joan hurried Pete. It was past two. She had to leave, to drive her mother to the eye doctor. When the board members finally departed, Pete came close to her, blocking her. “One minute?” His wife was sick, he explained, and he needed to take some time off that afternoon to look after his daughter. Joan was annoyed, but consented. She suspected that Pete didn’t like working for a woman. Before Pete was done talking, her assistant appeared.

  “Joanie.” Nobody but the assistant called her Joanie. “Can you just make two calls?” Joan couldn’t. She took her coffee cup with its plastic lid into the bathroom, rinsed it, and filled it with water. She was trying to drink more water. When she was absent during the working day, she made up the time: tonight, she’d work on the annual report. But she’d be tired, not thinking well. These interruptions—more and more of them lately—mattered. On her way out, carrying the water and mentally making one of those phone calls, she turned to look at the building she was losing, now obscured by poles and platforms. The woman in shorts stood just under the building’s peaked roof, like an oddly clad figurehead on a ship’s prow, but backward: a symbol of something lousy. Joan hurried. Her parents lived on the other side of the Q bridge, and there was always traffic.

  At eighteen, Joan had told her parents for the first time, but not the last, that they weren’t models of self-awareness. Sylvia and Lou sold their cramped two-family Brooklyn house and bought a one-family home in Queens. Joan claimed her mother suddenly wanted a big house so as to pretend that her children—Joan and her brother, Richard—weren’t growing up. “Don’t be silly,” said Sylvia. Joan went to college, then graduate school in psychology at Yale, where she met her husband. They stayed on in New Haven and had two sons and a daughter. Every so often, Joan proposed that her parents move closer to the grandchildren—Richard lived in New York, childless, with a series of boyfriends—but her mother made caustic remarks about aging people who fled the city. When Sylvia retired, she became a docent at the Whitney Museum, and as Joan’s children grew, their grandmother took them to the Hayden Planetarium and on long tramps through Central Park. It seemed that she and Lou had figured out how to be old—elder hostels, chamber music—but eventually, after the grandchildren had grown up in their turn and left home, Sylvia said, “I can’t die without living near water,” and Joan saw that the big house had at last become exhausting. Sylvia wore a hearing aid and walked with a cane, after breaking her hip. Lou was forgetful. They bought a condo outside New Haven, in Branford, though it was far from a bus line and Lou had stopped driving. “I drive,” Sylvia said, pointing out the wedge of sea—Long Island Sound—visible from their deck.

  They’d moved two years ago, and were fine for a year and a half. Then Sylvia abruptly lost most of the vision in one eye to optic neuritis. She, too, had to stop driving, and the van service for the elderly was unreliable. “At least I can still read,” she told Joan. “Sort of.” Sylvia was rereading War and Peace, carrying her old paperback to Stop & Shop and reading on the bench outside until the van returned for her. “He picks up every other old lady in Greater New Haven before he gets me,” she said. “The frozen foods are melted. And in all that time, how much do I read? Maybe three pages.” An ophthalmologist offered to perform cataract surgery on Sylvia’s better eye: reading might be easier. A month before the day Joan left the board meeting, she’d driven Sylvia to the hospita
l before dawn, then waited with growing nervousness for the cataract surgery to be over. Finally the doctor, voluble with exhaustion, found Joan in the waiting room. “It was a disaster,” he said. Joan was briefly distracted from her mother’s predicament by the doctor’s startling candor. He’d been unable to get the lens out—“Her eyes are very old, the lens was tough”—and when he finally did, the whole eye threatened to come with it. He’d pushed it in and sewn it up. “Your friends will tell you cataract surgery is nothing, and usually that’s right.”

  “This wasn’t your fault,” said Joan. “But she’s reading War and Peace.”

  The doctor nodded. “She told me.”

  In a month or two, he told Joan, he’d try again. Meanwhile, he saw Sylvia often, not specifying just what else he feared might go wrong. On dazzling days, Sylvia asked, “Is it sunny?” When Joan drove behind a huge truck, her mother said timidly, “Is something in front of the car?” To Joan’s dismay, the apologetic quaver irked her; but so did Sylvia’s other tones, too often. Joan knew that fear and love made her angry—fear and love and the lack of anything to do about her mother’s near blindness. They should have held a ritual with howling, she decided, but instead they made their way to the doctor and home again, while Joan’s work was neglected and Joan felt angry, and angry with herself for being angry—ever—at someone who couldn’t see.

  Now her father peered from the condo’s wide front window with its minimal vinyl trim, his face a gargoyle beside the evenly pleated beige drapes. Joan parked and walked, waving, toward the door. As she walked, she was suddenly convinced that she looked exactly like him, except that she’d been bigger than he was for years and years, and her hair was dyed blond. She could feel his expression on her mouth and cheeks, and she flexed her lips a few times.

  “What’s the matter?” he said, answering the bell.

  “I’m taking Mom to the doctor. Did you forget?”

  “Why should I forget? Of course I didn’t forget.”

  The interior was dim. Something was white: her mother’s blouse, under a navy blue jacket, as Sylvia moved forward, leaning on her cane. Joan watched, clutching her car keys and waiting for her eyes to adjust—sampling blindness. Sylvia must have worn that jacket to lead staff meetings in her last job, as facilitator of an alternative high school. No, she’d worn it to meet with the district superintendent. She’d run the school in men’s five-pocket jeans that never lost their stiffness. The jacket was too big now, hanging on her spare, canted body, the collar crowding her chin.

  “He didn’t give me lunch until five minutes ago,” Sylvia said. Her hair was white, too: short and straight, fluffed around her face and her large bony nose.

  “An hour,” said Lou. They’d eaten mostly eggs since Lou had become the cook, and Joan thought she saw egg on her mother’s lapel.

  “I can’t cook,” Sylvia said.

  “I know,” said Joan.

  Grasping cane and purse, Sylvia walked slowly out as Lou stuffed a five-dollar bill into Joan’s hand for the valet parking at the medical building.

  “Maybe you could see better in there if you turned on a light,” Joan said as they moved toward the car. She tried to walk more slowly.

  “Very light.”

  “I said, it’s dark in your house. You should turn on a light.”

  “We can’t change lightbulbs.”

  Joan opened the car door and her mother inserted herself. Joan made sure Sylvia’s legs were inside. She reached across her mother’s lap to fasten the seat belt, then closed the door. For a few seconds she was alone with one task: walk around the car. This is what it is like now, she always felt at this moment, as if time paused briefly. She got in. “Hi, you,” said Sylvia.

  “Hi, you,” Joan said, and with unexpected pleasure she reached over to pat her mother’s knee, took a drink of water, and drove back across the Q bridge.

  At the medical building, between them they got Sylvia standing, with the bag on her arm and the cane in her hand, and walked three steps away from the car. The automatic doors opened, and after another three steps, Joan could deposit her mother in an out-of-the-way spot while she gave her car keys to the efficient man who ran the valet parking service: a welcome temporary yielding of responsibility. When she returned, her mother had started up the ramp leading to the elevators, planting her cane emphatically. “Sixth floor,” said Sylvia, loudly and clearly, when Joan caught up. A middle-aged couple on the elevator smiled as if white-haired Sylvia was cute.

  “She’s reading War and Peace, and she likes the war parts better,” Joan said, but the couple looked baffled, and now it was time to maneuver her mother out of the elevator, past a troublesome tree in a pot, through a door, and into the waiting room. And her mother was no longer reading War and Peace.

  Joan found herself looking at everything—chairs and windows, the bright day outside—unnaturally aware of her eyesight. “Not many people today,” she said loudly. Strangers often took what she said to her mother as a remark aimed at a whole room, as if Joan spoke loudly for their benefit. Now, when they sat down and Joan had steadied the cane, a woman opposite nodded. “Your mother?” she said. “Lucky. Mine passed away.”

  “I am lucky.”

  Sylvia said, “That’s a woman. I can see it’s a black person, but I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.”

  “Can you see I’m young and gorgeous?” said the woman, who was gray-haired.

  “Sure,” said Sylvia, tilting her chin back jauntily, and the woman laughed and shook her head.

  When the doctor’s assistant called “Mrs. Applebaum,” Sylvia reached not for her own purse but Joan’s. The pocketbooks were similar—large leather envelopes with flaps and longish straps. Joan took her mother’s purse without comment and slung it on her shoulder, then joined the procession to the examining room. The purse was light compared to hers. The walk down the hall took long enough for Joan to consider that if toxic fumes suddenly issued from the heating system and they all passed out, rescuers would think she was Sylvia Applebaum with a Medicare card, not Joan Applebaum with a crammed appointment book and a cell phone.

  Sylvia’s eyesight had not changed since the last visit. With the eye that had had the surgery, she could see only light and dark. With her other, permanently damaged eye, she could see motion and fingers, but not count two fingers. She could not see an E projected on the wall, and could not see an E pointing in any direction on a card held by the assistant. “Can you see your daughter?”

  “I can see that someone is there,” said Sylvia lucidly. “With my bad eye. Which is now my good eye. I can tell it’s a white person. If I look carefully out of the corner of my eye, I can tell that this person is sitting.”

  “Good!” The assistant put drops in Sylvia’s eyes. Then she left Joan and Sylvia alone.

  Sylvia, waiting sleepily with Joan for the eye doctor, was hot. She’d always liked the way she looked in the jacket she was wearing, but it had to be dry cleaned. She and Lou had no way of getting to the dry cleaners, and she wasn’t going to make additional requests of Joan. She decided as she waited that she’d wear the jacket once or twice more and then put it in the garbage. With the jacket, a skirt was appropriate and that was all right: Lou could do laundry and she owned a washable skirt, which she had on. But with a skirt went knee-high nylons and loafers. Sylvia had two pairs of loafers and she wasn’t sure Lou could tell the difference. They were similar but not identical, and it was possible she was wearing one of each. One had a decorative band across the top; the other didn’t.

  All her life, Sylvia had been impressive. She’d been the swiftest child in her family at interpreting America for her immigrant parents, and she was a crackerjack at Hunter College. She’d had a long safe marriage enlivened by a secret affair. Retired after a fine career, she had won a tennis tournament. She didn’t want to ask Joan, “Do my shoes match?”

  Joan said something that sounded as if she didn’t want to sit there any longer. “He’ll be in s
oon,” Sylvia said.

  “I said I have to move. The office. The landlord is asking so much rent, we can’t stay.”

  “A shame,” Sylvia said. “You’re not going to get a truck and move yourself, will you?” Joan was a psychologist but she didn’t do much psychologizing.

  “I don’t know,” Joan said.

  “Hire movers. It’s worth it.” She could imagine Joan carrying boxes herself.

  Now the doctor came in, shook hands with Sylvia—she could see his white coat, which moved, and a blur of dark and glint that was his clothes and glasses—and said, “How are you, Mrs. Applebaum?”

  “Oh, everything hurts.”

  “Do you have pain in your eye—or your head?”

  “Most of my life I’ve had headaches,” Sylvia said.

  “Nothing new, though?” He moved a contraption in front of her. “Move forward for me,” he said. She pressed her face against the cold metal. “Good. Good.” Her pressure was good. That was what made the doctor nervous: pressure. Pressure of what on what she didn’t know. He spoke rapidly about the prospective surgery, and Sylvia hoped Joan was listening. “It looks good,” he said loudly to Sylvia herself. “You’re using the drops?”

  “My husband gets them confused,” Sylvia said.

  “Can you do it?” he asked.

  “How could I do it?” she said sharply. “I can’t see.”

  The doctor patted her knee. “I’m sorry. I was talking to your daughter. I forget if you live together.”

  Joan seemed to stand up. “No,” Sylvia heard her say. “We don’t live together, and I can’t go twice a day to supervise the drops.” And Joan moved forward and for some reason took Sylvia’s purse from her lap, then put it back—an action that seemed to amuse the doctor, who laughed nervously.

  Joan sounded apologetic now. “My father’s at his limit, but I’ll explain it again. I’ll make a chart.” Then she said, “They shouldn’t still be living alone.”