She orchestrates the arrival time with the administration at Sunrise home. She calls each one of my three aunts, just to give them a chance to give their blessings for the move, or not.
Finally, Anita calls my father once, twice, three times in his office, and cannot leave a message, because the answering machine must be full.
So she dials Mr. Bliss’s number, which she has managed, somehow, to find in a notebook in some drawer, and talks with his secretary, who seems quite surprised to be asked about Lenny.
By now everyone is on board regarding the piano—everyone, that is, except my father, who for the moment, cannot be reached anywhere.
Meanwhile I get a large frying pan, and turn the heat up, and start pouring batter till it hisses in there. I do it because I must. I must get myself busy, to delay thinking about what has happened here between us, to avoid realizing that a price would be paid for it. Sooner or later he would know what we have done.
No doubt I would be severely punished, and so would she.
I manage to burn the batter into pancakes, lifting one after another with a spatula into an attempted flip in the air. It turns out that despite years of trial and error, and above all, of unreasonable hope, still, to this day I am just as I used to be: an incredibly lousy cook.
By the time I am done, the scene is a mess. It brings to mind a charred battlefield. Some of the batter has ended up drizzling on the cooktop, and spattering onto the floor, mostly on my left foot, and on a limp rubber band, and a previously crisp one-hundred dollar bill, both of which are lying down there, in the dust. But I do not mind—and neither does Anita.
She plops down in the corner, and seems tired now, which I can tell, because she is even shivering a bit. I heap the pancakes onto a paper plate, and splash a chipped coffee mug with orange juice, and tear open a bag of salted peanuts which I got yesterday out of some vending machine, all of which I set in front of her—right there on the table—as if they were a truce offering.
I do it because on one hand, something must be done to take care of Anita.
Rewind. Play.
And on the other hand something must be done to take care of me, because my stomach is growling.
Chapter 28 Bei Mir Bistu Shein
As Told by Ben
The last thing I want to see is his face, when he comes home to realize that—poof!—the grand piano is gone. Vanished! My father is known to have an eccentric attachment to things, especially to that old, massive, ornately decorated, polished white beast. Why, you may ask? I have wondered about it, too, and can offer only this: it brings back to him a certain presence, the presence of mom, playing. So perhaps for him, it is a remnant of love: namely, guilt.
By the time I turned sixteen, mom had developed an unexplained fear, a fear of getting lost, which was quite pronounced, even as she headed out for a short walk, such as to the grocery store on Wilshire Boulevard, not more than a couple of blocks away. She seemed to rely, with an increasing sense of anxiety, on the familiar, and would become ferociously shaken if a chair was accidentally moved out of position. We all knew that the instrument—which was only hers, because I had stopped playing by then—was sacred. It was not to be touched.
And so, too, was she.
Which explained, of course, his restlessness. And later, his affairs. Yet in spite of them, my father had a lingering sense of obligation to her. To this day, he would never dream of letting go of that piano of hers.
But—holy cow—it’s already too late! I suspect that tonight, he would be not only surprised—but enraged, too, because the place looks so vacant, so foreign without it, as if it were not ours, but the next door neighbor’s apartment.
There is, suddenly, so much air.
I imagine him coming back home, later this evening, and taking a step back—away from the mat—to make certain he has unlocked the right door.
He would call, “Anyone home?” and an echo, a crisp echo would rattle the air, as if to announce an unusual depth, an emptiness.
He would then raise the key to his eyes, staring incredulously at it. It must be the right one, or else the lock would have jammed—but even so, the old man would check it again carefully, as if some bend, some scuff on the metal might, perhaps, explain the wrong turn of things.
He would rub his eyes, amazed to discover Beethoven's bust planted down there, in the dust, on the floor, its eyes frozen in dumb confusion. Discarded. No longer perched on top, it seems to have shrunk—or else the space has, somehow, ballooned around it.
The marble head seems cropped by a beam of light on one side, and a pile of music notebooks on the other. The sculpted shoulders lean against streaks of peeling wallpaper, blackened streaks that have previously gone unnoticed, crumbling away in the shadows, behind the bulk of the piano, which is now missing.
I cannot begin to guess what my father would say, if he would say anything at all, I mean, before he starts shouting.
I suppose he would blame this on his new wife, and—by association—on me as well. So I make up my mind to avoid trouble, or more precisely, to avoid him, which is something I have been getting better at doing over the last few days.
Chased by the sound of the dolly rumbling heavily across the floor, then down the stairs, and by the shouts of the movers yelling occasional warnings to Anita and me and to each other, I am relieved, finally, to see the moving van, loaded with piano and bench, lurching into the street.
Which is when I figure I should go somewhere, anywhere but here, perhaps to that hell hole called Sunrise, which is also where the van is headed.
I recall the pale, gaunt faces, the bent figures I have seen there, some attached by tubes to life-support machines, developing bed sores, others staggering around in slippers, slit open to accommodate bunions.
I would have to take in the odor, the unmistakable odor of decay and antiseptic, which is so nasty, so repugnant that the best hope you have is to be driven quickly out of your senses. But then, this I know: while there, I would be with mom.
And what is even better, I would not have to talk if I do not feel like it, because as far as I know, she is silent now. Utterly silent.
Soon, her piano will arrive. Watching it, her heart would skip a beat. Imagine that, I tell myself, because imagine I must. There must be some trick—perhaps as simple as reciting a few notes—some trick by which I can stir something, some memory in her mind. Mom cannot possibly be lost to me. She is merely asleep, waiting for a nudge. Her fingers can still tap, I think I have seen it on my last visit. They must remember various patterns of stroking the keys. They must remember music.
I doubt mom belongs here, or in any other such place, so I keep telling myself, This must be just a nightmare. I imagine she can still wake up, and open herself to a new day. I just need to believe it bad enough.
Assuming my father is still at work, Sunrise Assisted Living is the last place I would have expected to find him; which, as luck would have it, turns out to be a complete miscalculation on my part.
There he is, in the large dining hall, pacing impatiently to and fro, then around the long Formica table, some distance away from the elderly figures hunched there, some over their walking frames, others in wheelchairs. He has me caught in his sight as I get in, and a minute later I feel his grip on my arm.
“What—what are you doing here? Oh,” he mutters, “never mind. I don’t want to hear you now. No! Don’t say a word.”
Which leaves me no choice but to rebel against him, and so I ask, “And why not?”
“Oh, stop—just stop it,” he says, looking over his shoulder, clearly in anticipation of my mother. “It is always too many questions with you.”
And I stress, “Why?”
And he says, in a hushed tone of voice, “Just go. Go away, before she gets here.”
So I cry, “What?”
“Your mom,” he says, “she used to tell me repeatedly that she will not want any visits from you.”
“Now that,” I say, “is a l
ie! It just has to be!”
But my father insists, “Ben, you do not understand. Natasha would never have wanted you to see her like that.”
And to my question, “So then, why are you here?” he replies, briskly at first, “Just because.”
But then he goes on to explain, “With me, she had little choice. I have been the one watching over her, the one who has seen the change. But you, son—you are still blind to it. Go away! Trust me: she would tell you so herself, if she could, because see, you are the one she cherished.”
And I say, “Huh!” to which I add, bitterly, “What an odd way to show love.”
“Yes,” he says. “I grant you that. But consider this, Ben: she wants you to remember her the old way, the way she was. Bright. Talented. Most of all, healthy.”
For a while, neither one of us speaks. The old man looks remarkably tired, his jaw less defined than usual, perhaps because of the gray stubble on it, which takes the edge off the features of his face. He must have skipped his morning ritual, by which I mean, his shave.
So I soften a bit, just enough to ask him, “And you, dad? You miss her? I mean, the way she used to be?”
For a minute he holds his breath, and I see him glancing at a dark silhouette passing across the far windows of the dining hall.
Then he says, “She still walks on both feet, still looks the same, more or less. To a stranger, Natasha still looks as if nothing at all is wrong with her. The shell, so to speak, is intact. You are young, son, and may laugh at what I say, but to me she is beautiful. Pure. As if only a few days have passed since I first laid eyes on her. But on each visit I see changes. Each time, her mind disappears a little bit more.”
“Dad, you still didn’t give me an answer.”
“Do I miss her? No, son,” he says, and takes a long, painful pause. “Not all the time.”
“Was it difficult for you, bringing her here?”
“For several weeks, I had dreaded what she would say. That morning I got up from bed, and found her talking to the mirror. I said, This is a special day, Natasha! Let’s go out for breakfast. And pointing straight ahead, at the glass, she said, OK, and what about her, is she coming, too? And I said, No, not today. Just you and me. Oh, she said, OK. And to her reflection she said, Goodbye. And so we came here.”
“Again, dad: you still didn’t give me an answer.”
“Was it difficult to bring her? No,” he says. “The difficult part was to leave her behind, and go home, and find myself lonely, lonely and empty and, at long last, free. I stood there, on the threshold, without her, not knowing what to do with my hands.”
“And mom, what about her? Having clung, so hard and so long, to that which was still familiar around her, did she resist being left here, in a strange place, suddenly alone? I mean, was she furious? Did she cry?”
“All along,” he says, “she was uneasy about making plans for herself. She insisted on going back home, staying there until, she said, The good Lord would show pity, and take her. But that morning, when at last we got here, to Sunrise home, I found a new way to respond, which I admit, I am not proud of. I told her that the apartment was about to be fumigated for termites.”
“You what—”
“So she agreed to stay here, temporarily. I knew she was unable to keep track of time. In fact, I counted on it. I told her the work would take one more day, and the next day I said, one more, and the day after that, one more, and so on, and on, which seemed to convince her, somehow—until, to my relief, she stopped asking.”
“Listen to me,” I say angrily, finding myself forced, yet again, to repeat. “Was she furious? Did she cry?”
“No,” he says, and his voice turns stubborn. “If she did, I did not see it.”
“And she stopped asking? Stopped talking, even?”
“Yes,” he says. “That is correct.”
“No wonder,” I say, resisting a sudden urge to spit in his face. “You lied to her!”
My father glances at me, contempt flashing from his eyes.
“Who the hell are you to judge me. Much do you care! You were not even here, goddam it! To this day, you have no idea what happened, what I had to go through, over the years, with her,” he grumbles. “So just spare me the—”
This is when his eyes widen, and a few things happen at such a fast pace, that the details threaten to escape me. So at the risk of confusion, here goes:
There is a distant sound of rumbling, it draws closer, grinds to a stop, the figures, the misshapen figures at the table, they turn around, highly agitated, some of them scream, at high pitch, at the movers, who have just arrived, talking to someone, some woman in a nurse uniform, no, it’s the care giver, forgot her name, Martha. Some papers change hands, mark Donation here, please, and a signature there, now hold the door, wider. The dolly is rolled in, first here, then there. It’s too far, careful now, stop! Now it’s too close to the windows, and the table, someone says, might be in the way, that’s a safety hazard. So on go the wheels, turning, squeaking until the thing is lined, properly now, against the wall, and the blankets, a few layers of them, are being untied, unwrapped already from one leg, then another. They look OK, no scratches, and the dark figure, the silhouette out there, she raises a hand, as if moved around by some invisible strings, and it claps to her mouth.
My father cuts off mid-sentence, shocked at the sight, at the white piano, his face turns red, dark red with blood, just as I thought, as I was afraid it would, he rushes ahead, hugs her, walks her over, step by step, to the far corner, tells her to breathe.
“Breathe deeply,” he says, which is when I come to attention, because this is the instant when I recognize, of course, who she is. Mom.
“My God,” he glares at me, eyes narrowed with suspicion. “What—what have you done, you and Anita?”
At that moment, with barely a thud, my mother slips out of his hold and, in a snap, collapses to the floor. By the time she comes to, moments later, the movers have already gone, and Martha has gotten everything and everybody firmly under control. Now she guides mom into a comfortable, upholstered chair, and slides it next to a window, which dad, now deathly pale, throws open.
Then she adjusts the resealable tape of a diaper over the hip of one of the seniors, wipes the dribble from the chin of another. Martha brings in an assortment of simple musical implements, such as bongos, tambourines, toy bells, egg shakers and xylophones. She hands one of them—a metallic triangle—to mom, and the rest to the other seniors to play, as if they were children, eager children about to put together an impromptu live show.
One of them, a decrepit, toothless hag cruises up to the front in her wheelchair to get a better look at the piano. Frail, much like a wooden puppet, she drags her bony, crooked body over to the bench, slides open the cover, and bangs at the keys.
The melody is familiar, but played haltingly, and with an awkward touch, which makes me wish mom would stand up, walk over there right now and show them, show all of them just how it is done, and what fine music ought to sound like, performed with inspired virtuosity by the hand of a renowned pianist, trained from early in life in a variety of memorization techniques.
But no: there she sits, her long fingers idle, her eyes nearly shut, as if trying to block out all distractions, perhaps to divine a particular sequence of music, or to recall the fierce, blind stare emanating from an imaginary bust, the bust of Beethoven, or else just to drift off.
The other seniors gather around the toothless amateur, and they start shaking their wrinkled fingers in the air, in pantomime of her gestures, and humming, La-la, la-la-la! La-la, la-la-la! One of them is so swept by the rhythm, as to warble in a thin, cracked voice, somewhat out of tune,
Bei mir bist du shein,
Bei mir host du chein,
Bei mir bist du alles oif di velt.
For some reason the singing grates, quite harshly, on my nerves. I am surprised to find myself so upset. For a time I do not even realize I have water in my eyes. The entir
e space starts swimming in front of me, and I am glad that my father does not seem to notice it, or else he may think I am weeping.
Weeping—can you imagine that?—out of some weakness or something.
The reason I am so lucky as to be ignored is that his face hangs there, away from me, over his chest, and is held in that position, nearly masked by the palms of his hands. I get the feeling that under that cover, his mind has been carried away elsewhere. Perhaps he is thinking about the first time he saw mom.
From reading his stories I know it happened quite by chance, when he accompanied a friend to some concert, and sat there, raising his eyes from the second row, and there she was, up on stage, aglow in a sphere of light.
Apart From Love Page 26
