“They like their independence,” said the doctor. “I don’t blame them.”
Sylvia didn’t like her independence. She had none left. But she couldn’t imagine how to make a change in the way they lived. It was all she could do to explain to Lou, over and over again, what went in the recycling bin and where she kept the laundry soap.
“We can fix it, Mrs. Applebaum,” the doctor said. “I think. I hope.”
“I don’t think so,” said Sylvia.
When Joan took her own purse back, she opened it, and instantly remembered that she’d failed to put the annual report on a floppy disk so she could work on it at home that night. The discovery made her anxious. When her mother asked plaintively if there was time for her to go to the bathroom, Joan replied sharply, “Of course you can go to the bathroom!” but waited for her impatiently. Maneuvering her mother and the cane downstairs, handing over the five-dollar bill, and getting the two of them into the car, she worried that her mother would mind an additional stop, but when she proposed going to her office, her mother was pleased. “I haven’t seen it in years,” Sylvia said. Then, “Not that I can see it, exactly,” she said with a laugh that sounded like the mother Joan had known as a girl.
“You’re brave,” Joan murmured, suddenly glad—as she would have been years ago—to have the chance to take her mother to the place where she worked.
“I’m what?”
“Brave.”
Joan told her mother about the renovations to the building, the masonry workers. “It’s too bad you can’t see the scaffolding. It’s interesting.” It was past five, and Future House was closed. One car—Pete’s, to Joan’s surprise—was in the small lot. Joan parked and once more helped Sylvia. The stucco workers had gone as well, leaving drop cloths and planks piled at the side of the lot. Sylvia hesitated, and Joan touched her mother’s elbow to guide her. They’d have to use the steps—there was a ramp, but that entrance would be locked from inside. “Okay, you’re almost there,” Joan said as they approached the climb. The cane touched the bottom step. “Okay, up. Up again. Two more . . .”
Pete’s daughter—a four-year-old with lots of curly hair and a worried, adult look—stood at the top of the steps watching them. “Why are you holding a stick?” she said.
Sylvia looked up. “A child?”
“Yes.”
“I can just make him out.”
“It’s a girl,” Joan said. “Her father works with me.”
“My grandma don’t walk with a stick,” the girl said again. Joan remembered her name: Dolores.
“Doesn’t. Not every grandma needs one,” Sylvia said firmly but pleasantly—sounding like someone who had worked with children.
“Are you Puerto Rican?” Dolores now asked.
“No,” said Sylvia. “I’m Jewish. What are you?”
“I’m everything.”
“Good for you!” said Sylvia. It was true that Dolores was everything. When Pete had applied for his job, he checked every box on the optional section of the form called “How Do You Describe Yourself?”: he was black, white, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American, he said, and was glad to tell you about his half-Chinese Guatemalan grandfather or the black grandmother who had married an Indian.
Joan helped her mother into the building. The door stood open, and as they moved into the hallway, Joan could hear Pete’s voice on the phone. “No, sweetie, no,” he was saying. “Soon, honey . . .”
“Who’s taking care of her?” Sylvia said. “She should come inside.”
“I think her father is in that office, right over there,” Joan said, speaking loudly for Pete’s benefit.
“Don’t point and say ‘that,’ ” Sylvia said. “Why does everybody point when they’re talking to blind people?”
Now Pete’s voice said, “Listen, I can’t . . . no, it’s just—” A minute later he appeared in the hallway. “Dolores!” he called. “I told her to play inside!”
He was having an affair, Joan thought. Pete was having an affair. Not with one of her counselors, surely. Not with a client, she prayed. Pete made her feel sexy, she realized. Maybe he was having an affair with a big woman, like Joan.
“Hi,” she said, and introduced Pete to her mother.
Dolores came inside. “Look what I found,” she said. “I found a lot of them.”
She was holding her hands together to grasp something difficult to hold, and she took her booty not to her father but to Sylvia. “Look what I found,” she said. “Look.”
“What is it?”
“Look.”
“I can’t see,” said Sylvia, who dropped her handbag on the floor to investigate with her fingers. “Sharp!” she said. “What is it, Joan? Nails?” The stucco workers had left some of the long, sharp nails with which, all day, they’d been hammering wire mesh into place. “She could hurt herself badly,” Sylvia continued, while Dolores said with increasing urgency, “Why can’t you see?”
Joan thought Pete might feel accused and angry, but he had taken to her mother. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m stupid. Here, baby, give me those.”
“I want her to see!” said Dolores.
“She can’t see,” her father said.
“Why not? Why can’t she see?”
“I need to make a call,” Pete said, and hurried into his office. Then Joan brought a chair from her own office, across the hall, and helped her mother sit down, right where she was, with her cane in her lap. Back in her office, she found a floppy disk, and sat down at the computer. She heard Pete’s voice on the phone again, and Sylvia, once more talking to Dolores.
It didn’t take long to copy the report onto a disk. Joan turned off her computer and put the disk into her purse. She approached her mother from behind, saying “All done,” and her mother stood and took a step, groping for the cane, which had slid to the floor. “Wait, I’ll get it,” Joan said. But as she came near, Sylvia’s white head and her shoulders in the navy blue jacket began to sink. Joan knocked the chair aside and received her mother, who relaxed slowly into her arms. Joan was not exactly frightened, only very, very careful: too careful to think what might be happening. “Pete!” she shouted, lowering herself to her knees with her mother’s weight on the front of her body, then moving slowly backward and easing Sylvia to the linoleum floor.
Pete pushed her aside. “I know CPR,” he said. “Call 911.” Swiftly he felt Sylvia’s wrist and Joan ran toward her office, thinking, Dial 9 for an outside line. Pete began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on Joan’s mother, and Dolores cried.
It was peculiar, Sylvia thought. Certainly she had been standing, looking around out of habit although she couldn’t see her cane—except that sometimes, out of the corner of her good (formerly bad) eye, she saw something, for a second, perfectly. But now she was stretched on her back on the floor, with a mouth—the vigorous, practiced, muscular mouth of a man—pressing down on hers, while the man’s breath made her cough and the tomato sauce flavor of his lunch came unpleasantly into her own mouth. But as sometimes in kissing, it was an unpleasantness Sylvia could put aside—even enjoy—because of what else was taking place. “Love,” said Sylvia, and the man took his mouth away from hers and spoke. She could see a swirl of dark and light as the man’s clothing and his skin moved back and forth over her, while walls—she could see walls—rose behind him. His voice was loud but unclear, as if the wrong knob on a radio had been turned. And a child was crying. Sylvia felt the man’s damp hands on her shoulders. They trembled. She didn’t know if she knew him. Something was wrong with her eyes. Now two people—Joan, one of them was Joan—knelt over her. Something moved across Sylvia’s arm and neck. It was rubbery and springy, twisted—the cord of a telephone, because Joan had stretched the phone cord so she could kneel next to Sylvia while talking. “Hurry!” she was saying.
“I’m fine,” Sylvia said. “Don’t be silly. I’m fine.”
Change
My aunts claimed that my mother blurted out anything that came into her h
ead, and though now I can’t think of any examples, my mother and I believed them, and believed that bright people don’t blurt. As a boy, growing up in Brooklyn in the fifties and sixties, I tried—often unsuccessfully—not to ask embarrassing questions, not to brandish opinions. Having few friends, I was alone with several puzzling circumstances that couldn’t be discussed freely. I had an uncle, for instance, who was neither the brother nor brother-in-law of my mother or my father. I knew my mother’s brother, her four sisters, and all their spouses. I didn’t know my father, and for a while I thought Uncle Edwin—a salesman of bakery equipment—was my father’s brother, who visited my mother in our small apartment twice a week (Thursday evening, Saturday morning) out of pity because my father had left her. Yet Uncle Edwin’s last name was Friend, while ours was Kaplowitz, and Uncle Edwin did not know which high school my father had gone to.
My mother waited until I was asleep on Thursdays before taking Uncle Edwin into her bedroom, but I knew she did—as children always know—and wondered why it was a secret, why he was gone in the morning, and why my father’s brother got undressed—I knew that, too—if he wasn’t sleeping over. A few years later, when I understood more, I’d pretend to be asleep to please my mother. Later still, too old to be put to bed, I’d give off a stagy yawn not long after supper, go into my room, and close the door. Then I learned that Uncle Edwin left at about ten. My yawn sustained the fiction that I didn’t know Bobbie slept with him. She wasn’t a blurter, she never said they were lovers, much less anything else she knew.
When I was thirteen, our dentist retired. “I’ll ask Sylvia for the name of her dentist,” my mother said. I had a dental form the school wanted filled out, but I suspected that a dentist patronized by my rigorous aunt Sylvia would consider it all right to hurt. Uncle Edwin, who was bland but kind—initiating only rudimentary conversations with me, but agreeing emphatically when Bobbie praised me—would know a kind dentist. I said nothing to my mother, but on Edwin’s next Saturday visit, while they sat in the kitchen talking, I asked for the name of his dentist.
It didn’t seem like an embarrassing question, but Uncle Edwin, to my dismay, hesitated, then apologized for hesitating, as if we might think he had a selfish desire to deprive me of dental care. At last he told us: Dr. Dressel. My mother began seeing Aunt Sylvia’s dentist, but she made an appointment for me with Dr. Dressel, though his office was halfway across Brooklyn and we had to take two buses.
Dr. Dressel’s hygienist cleaned my teeth with conscientious glee, then tried to persuade me to take up flossing, demonstrating by slicing a thin cord adroitly into my gums. I’d never heard of flossing—she was ahead of her time—and when Dr. Dressel came in to look me over, I demanded to know if he flossed his teeth.
“Occasionally,” he said sheepishly, but after that he called me “Counselor” or “The D.A.” and joked about being cross-examined. Dr. Dressel tried hard not to hurt me, though he had to fill many cavities. His jokes were obvious to begin with and became more so, and nothing he said implied anything left unsaid. Two years later my teeth were just teeth, nothing more, to Dr. Dressel and Dorothy, the hygienist. I didn’t know why Uncle Edwin had hesitated to speak of this straightforward, unmysterious man, but decided he must have thought Bobbie wouldn’t want him to. Maybe he was afraid my mother would consider it presumptuous for Edwin to advise me when he wasn’t my dad.
Uncle Edwin never came late or early, never came on a Friday or a Wednesday. It seemed that if he tried, his car would not only fail to start but he might be transformed into a tree or a constellation, the doom of girls in myths. He’d be trapped within bark and sap and dense greenish wood, or hurled into the zodiac. His presences and absences were unexplained, yet my mother behaved as if the reasons for them were self-evident, so protests were impossible. What can’t be examined can’t be changed sensibly.
When I was quite young, I gradually noticed that in public life—as in private—what eventually took place was the least remarkable possible event. My older cousin Richard sometimes made me listen to him play the piano while our mothers drank coffee in Aunt Sylvia’s kitchen. The music sounded angry to me—alarming, as if it might break the piano. When Richard finally turned from the instrument, sweaty and quiet, he’d flip on the television and watch a news broadcast, shaking his head. Inattentive, still hearing the rushing piano notes in the back of my mind, I would explain to myself that whatever Richard feared was not going to happen. The United States was—or perhaps was not—innocent, trustworthy, and harmless. The Russians were the enemy, but they looked like my uncles. War was always imminent, yet again and again I did not find myself lying facedown in the gutter on my way home from school, my hands futilely clasped over my tender medulla as the bomb fell. I walked uneventfully home.
For people I knew, things sometimes changed, but passively, and usually for the worse. A neighborhood might deteriorate, a person give something up. Scolding one another was my aunts’ and uncles’ primary mode of discourse, and they all scolded my mother to give up—to give up Edwin and to give up much more. At holiday dinners and during Sunday visits, they told her—and me if I was listening—not to think we could do things. My mother thought she could bake strudel, she thought she could sew a dress that she would then wear, she thought she could take college courses, and in all cases my aunts and uncles were right: it was foolish to be caught—only Bobbie would let herself be caught—trying, or even looking as if she might try. Bobbie could knit—she did knit—but my aunts warned her not to try anything complicated, like a cable. I suppose they told Richard he couldn’t play the piano, but he resisted them better than I did, because life at Aunt Sylvia’s was not as puzzling as life at our house.
After Bobbie’s long-ago famously foolish marriage, nothing she or her child did would alter anything, or not really, or not for long—and indeed, one of the mysteries was about me. I thought repeatedly of nakedly touching not women but men. I tried to revise my fantasies, but they persisted. I didn’t fear being homosexual—that would be interesting. Sadly, I knew it was not possible to be that surprising, at least where I lived, at least if you were the boy I was. If someday I found a willing man and a nearby bed, my aunts and uncles would see to it that as I reached to touch him the man would become a woman, a bride in shiny white cloth. “What are you knocking your brains out for?” Uncle Morris would say—my real uncle, unlike Edwin, that mild impostor. “Now, Bradley, wouldn’t it have been smarter to pick a girl in the first place?”
Sometimes, waiting to fall asleep, I had a fantasy of travel, which was really a fantasy of action. I’d picture the map of the United States with each state in a different color. Then I’d imagine myself barefoot, with a classic bundle, tied up in a bandanna, on a stick over my shoulder. I’d pause at the edge of the map, then step onto it and take off, striding in my imagination across states that changed from colored shapes to dusty roads lined with lush fields or forests. Soon, though, swirls and dimness obscured forests, mountains, and highways, cause and effect dissolved, and I was nowhere.
As I grew older, my mother took it upon herself to answer a question I hadn’t asked: why she and Edwin didn’t get married. At last I was allowed to know they were sweethearts. Edwin had an aged mother, Bobbie said, so frail she couldn’t withstand the experience of meeting my mother or me, much less having us become her relatives. There was a wordless pause, and I knew that what we were not discussing at that particular moment was our being Jewish. Breaking my rule against blurting, I said, “If she’s so frail, why hasn’t she died by now?” Edwin had been in our lives as long as I could remember.
“It’s good that his mother hasn’t died!” said Bobbie. She and my father had been divorced since I was two, when she brought me on the train to Reno and we stayed there six weeks, but I wondered if the truth was that Bobbie had refused Edwin, still missing my father and hoping he’d return.
Then—it was November of 1963—I got a toothache. My mother called Dr. Dressel, who could see me that d
ay. I was in pain, and Bobbie would have gone with me, but she had to go to work. She was a bookkeeper in a commercial bakery. That’s how she’d met Edwin, when he came through selling supplies. It was a school day, but I neither went to school nor stayed home. I rode the bus—two buses—to the dentist. Despite the pain in my tooth, I took some satisfaction in seeing what the city looked like when I was ordinarily in a classroom. Brooklyn, like Dr. Dressel, was frankly ordinary, with its corner groceries and bars, its brownstones and bus stops, from which old women slowly walked down the long blocks, pulling or pushing shopping carts. When I reached the dentist’s office, the pain in my mouth had subsided a little, and I was almost afraid he wouldn’t find anything, but he probed and nodded. I was tensing against the drill—the sound hurt, and sometimes the drill hurt, despite painkiller—when I heard something disconcerting on the almost inaudible radio. Dr. Dressel stopped and squirted water into my mouth. The announcer sounded not like someone on the radio but like a regular person—a regular person who was upset.
“Wait a minute,” I said. I held up my hand like a traffic cop and the dentist laughed. He thought that once more I was going to cross-examine him. Then we both listened, and we heard that President Kennedy had been shot.
“It’s not true,” he said. I thought that, too: it couldn’t be true. “Rinse,” he said, releasing the lever to fill a paper cup with water.
I filled my mouth slowly and listened some more. “It’s true,” I said. I unclipped my paper bib. “I have to go.” I was about to cry or vomit.
“No, I have to finish.” He reached both hands toward me in a nondental way and I thought he was about to take my face in his hands, but they stopped in the air. Then he clipped my bib back into place, and turned to the sink, where he washed his hands for a long time while the shocked voice said “Dallas” and other words. Dr. Dressel stepped out of the room, and then the radio went off. He returned and washed his hands once more in the silence. Waiting, I took another cup of water and drank. When he was done filling my tooth at last and had let me out of the chair, I turned the wrong way and saw Dorothy alone in her hygienist’s room, her hands over her face, crying. I left the office, my tooth whole and numbed and unassailable. People were on the streets, and because they were all saying the same thing, I could hear everyone’s conversation at once. They were saying that Kennedy had been shot. Then they were saying he had died.
In Case We're Separated Page 12
