Mine too, I realized. I wouldn’t have felt that way once upon a time. It used to be that Maud May was my favorite. Maud May was so let-it-all-hang-out. But I don’t know; you start to appreciate the other type of person, by and by — those ultracivilized types who keep their good humor and gracious manners even though their joints are aching nonstop and they can’t climb out of their baths without help and they’re not always sure what day it is. I’d be terrible at that myself.
• • •
“What are you giving Sophia for Christmas?” my mother asked on the phone.
“Oh …,”I said, hedging.
“Because I don’t want to interfere, but if you’d ever care for a piece of your grandmother Gaitlin’s jewelry — such as, say, for example, maybe perhaps a ring, perhaps, or something of that sort — you have only to ask.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but we’ve agreed not to bother with presents this year.”
“Why, for goodness’ sake?”
Why was a question of money, but I didn’t want to say so for fear Mom would segue into the eighty-seven hundred. Instead I told her, “Just lacking in Christmas spirit, I guess.”
Mom sighed. “But you do plan to bring her to dinner,” she said.
“She’s going up to Philly that weekend.”
“To Philly? Does that mean you’re going too?”
“No, I thought I’d stick around and pester you and Dad,” I said.
“Oh.”
“I can see you’re overjoyed at the prospect.”
“Well, naturally we’re delighted to have you! But I was thinking her people might like to get to know you a little better.”
“Evidently not,” I told her.
Sophia had, in fact, invited me, but I had made up this story about how I didn’t want to disappoint my parents. “For someone so down on his family,” she’d said, “you certainly seem to see an awful lot of them.” I told her I felt obligated, because Jeff and Wicky would be visiting Wicky’s folks for Christmas and Mom was all upset about it.
Which she was, no lie, but my presence at dinner was hardly going to change that. “Christmas will be so pathetic this year!” she was saying now. “Just you and Gram and Pop-Pop. I wonder if I should invite Dad’s cousin Bertha.”
“You detest Cousin Bertha,” I reminded her.
She said, “It’s such a pity Opal’s not coming.”
“We’ll have our turn next Christmas.”
“The two of you have been getting along so well together…. She should start spending her summers here, don’t you think? Or winters, even. We could enroll her in one of the private schools. Then for college, of course, she would go to Goucher. She could room with us, if she likes, although I suppose she’d prefer the dormitory. But dorms are so noisy! Studying in a dorm is such a struggle!”
“Mom. She’s barely ten years old,” I said.
She sighed again. Then she asked, “Should I invite Len Parrish?”
“I wouldn’t bother.”
“I could tell him to park the Corvette around the corner, where your Pop-Pop won’t have to look at it.”
“It’s not the Corvette,” I said.
“What, then?”
Someday I should get credit for all the things I don’t say. Like, “Your hero is a sleazeball, Mom.” What I told her was, “He’s got other plans, I’m sure. He’s a very popular guy.”
“Well,” she said. “All right.”
This was so untypical of her — I mean, the resigned and listless tone she used — that I caught myself feeling sorry for her. I remembered what she had said at Thanksgiving: how I was more her son than Dad’s, more related to her. It seemed that now I was taking that in for the very first time. Poor Mom! It hadn’t been much fun loving someone as thorny as me, I bet.
So when she told me she’d better hang up because she had a hair appointment, I said, “Mom. You know what I think? I really think your hair would look great if you stopped dyeing it.”
It was meant to be a kindness, but it backfired. “You may not like it, but all my friends say it looks lovely!” she snapped. And then she told me goodbye and slammed the receiver down.
Well, no surprise there. Just because we were related didn’t mean we were any good at understanding each other.
“In the afterlife,” Maud May told me, “God’s got a lot of explaining to do.”
“What about?” I asked. I was unpacking groceries, and she was smoking a cigarette at her kitchen table.
“Oh,” she said, “children suffering, cancer, tidal waves, tornadoes …”
“You think those need explaining? Tornadoes just happen, man. You think God sits around aiming tornadoes at people on purpose?”
“… old ladies breaking their hips and becoming a burden …”
“The most He might explain is how to deal with a tornado,” I said. “How to accept it or endure it or whatever; how to do things right. That’s what I’m going to ask about when I get to heaven myself: how to do things right.”
Then I said, “Anyhow. You’re not an old lady.”
“Good Gawd, Barnaby, you’ve gone and bought those goddamned generic tea bags again!”
I looked at the box I was holding. I said, “Rats. I thought they were Twinings.”
“Interesting that you imagine you’ll get into heaven,” Maud May said wryly. She blew a cloud of smoke in my direction.
“And also, you’re not a burden,” I added.
She inspected the end of her cigarette and then turned to stub it out. “Though who knows?” she asked the ashtray. “Nowadays, they’re probably letting all kinds of people in.”
Christmas fell on a Monday this year; so Friday the twenty-second was full of those last-minute chores our clients wanted seen to when guests were about to descend. Folding cots brought down from attics, wreaths hung from high-up places, major supplies of liquor hauled in. Most of this I had to handle alone, because Martine was helping out at her brother’s. The new baby was in the hospital with pneumonia. I hadn’t even realized new babies could get pneumonia. So Martine spent the first part of Friday baby-sitting her nephews, and then at three I stopped by her brother’s house to collect her for a job at Mr. Shank’s. Mr. Shank had taken it into his head he needed his entire guest-room furnishings exchanged with the furnishings in the master bedroom, and he needed it now, and next week or next month wouldn’t do.
Only, things at Martine’s brother’s house were never simple. First the sister-in-law was late getting back from the hospital, and then when she did get back she was weepy and distraught, and Martine didn’t want to leave her that way. So I sat in the kitchen, which was a mess, racing wind-up cars with the nephews, while Martine gave her sister-in-law rapid little pats on the back and told her everything would be fine. No mother in the world, she said, would have guessed that a tiny sniffle could go to a baby’s lungs that way. And of course he and Jeannette would still bond; wasn’t she with him in the hospital most of every day and half the night? So Jeannette brightened up and insisted on serving us fruitcake before she would let us leave. I’m a sucker for fruitcake. I like the little green things, the citrons. Why don’t we ever see citrons in the produce section? What are citrons, anyhow? I had two slices and had just cut myself a third, when Jeannette said, “Oh, great. Hand me the breast pump, will you, Barn? I’m leaking all over the last clean blouse I own.” Which reminded me in a hurry that we really ought to be going.
Martine drove, so that I could finish my fruitcake. She was still at her brother’s house, mentally. She nearly ran a stop sign telling me how Jeannette was going to land in the hospital herself if she wasn’t careful. “That fruitcake’s the only thing I’ve seen her eat in the last three days,” she said, “and fruitcake’s not exactly what you’d call the staff of life. I tried to get her to have some breakfast this morning before she left, but she said she couldn’t. I told my brother, at least she ought to be drinking fluids. You need your fluids for the breast milk.”