“Really?” Max answered. “When I was a teenager it always seemed to me mothers were the easiest people to fool. Freddy, Andy, Barry and me, we could come in stoned out of our minds, tell you we hadn’t gotten enough sleep and you’d buy it.”
She squinted at him, annoyed. After a moment she slapped his hand. “Don’t be a wise guy,” she said.
“You were fooled because you wanted to be fooled, Mom. I didn’t mean you were gullible.”
“We didn’t know about drugs, that’s all. It never occurred to us. If you had had extra money I’d have known you were a thief. If you had had bruises I’d have known you were in a gang. If you had thrown up your breakfast, I’d have known you were drinking. I could smell the cigarettes on your clothes. But bloodshot eyes? I thought you’d been up all night listening to rock music.”
Max smiled at her old face. He remembered the shameful secrecy of adolescence, moving his pornography and cigarettes from one drawer to another, rotating them away from her searches. She had found them anyway. “You’re right, Mom. You were no fool.”
“Why did you send that thing to me?”
“What thing?”
“You know—” she winced. She lowered her eyes. They were still young despite the wrinkles around them. They sparkled with humor and curiosity — and pain. “You know what I’m talking about. Why did you send that box of tools to me?”
He had forgotten about the gift buying. That belonged somewhere in the smashed part of his brain. He thought about it before answering. He remembered the nervous salesman copying the address. He had had to send the gift to his father. Where did his father live but with his mother? “You didn’t look at the card.”
“I looked. That was crazy and it hurt me. But I don’t believe you meant it. It was sent to me. You were sending me some kind of message.” She tapped his hand again. “Just tell me what you want to say to me, Max. ”
“I wanted to buy Dad a gift. You know I never got to buy him anything.” She turned away from this answer, wounded, ready to walk out. He continued, “Where could I send it? To his grave?” She looked back at him. Her young eyes wavered in their crinkled settings. “I bought the toolbox for my living father,” Max went on. “And where does my father live? With you. His picture — that picture where he’s ten years younger than I am — is still on your living room wall, and there’s another beside your bed. You haven’t remarried, you haven’t forgotten. He’s still alive in your house. If I want to give a gift to my father I have to send it to you.”
Her eyes searched him. They went back and forth across his face, in no hurry. She expected him to wait until she had finished her search, just as she used to while interrogating him for confessions of adolescent debauchery. “You’re not crazy,” she mumbled.
“No,” Max said and he gently slapped her hand.
She laughed. Her eyes teared up suddenly. She reached for her purse. She opened it fast, found a tissue, and blew her nose. With that done she looked at him: “Don’t ever do that again. You want to buy something for your father? Do what I do. Make a donation in his name to your favorite charity.”
“That wasn’t the idea—”
“I don’t care about your ideas!” She got up. “Don’t do that to me again.”
“Why didn’t you remarry?” Max shot this past all the sentinels that had always halted the question before it could be given a voice.
It was a shot that stopped her in her tracks. “Nobody asked,” she said.
“Come on, Mom. Did you love him that much? Was he that perfect?”
She smirked. It was a private amused twist of her curvy lips — almost mischievous. “I had two children, I was almost middle-aged. I wasn’t much of a prize.”
Max felt bound by his hospital bed. Its thin sheet was drawn taut across his stomach by the nurse’s overzealous bedmaking. He pushed at it with his belly and pulled at its edges with his hands, but remained trapped. He wanted to get up, in spite of his aching head. His mother came over and pulled them away. “What are you doing, Max?” she asked. “You want to get up?”
He was trembling. He was frightened. But of what? “I’m forty-two years old, Mom!” He got himself turned and slung his legs out of the mechanical bed. It had been raised so high only his toes reached the floor. “Why don’t you tell me the truth! Are we strangers? Do I have to worm it out of you? Do I have to get you drunk?”
She took his arm and supported him as he slid down until both feet rested on the cold floor. “What do you want to know, Maxy?” she asked, startled into using her childhood name for him.
Standing beside her he looked down at her small skull, sparsely covered by dyed hair. He felt her feeble arm in his. He was astounded at how little and old she was. “You didn’t even try, Mom,” he said, despairing of the interrogation. He pressed on hopelessly. “Why didn’t you try to find another man? You lived without love—”
“I had love, Maxy, I had my children.”
“I mean sex! You lived without sex!” His head seemed to blow up. A bell of pain rang in his ears; a cloud of pain worsened the fog in his eyes. He slipped down into the chair she had moved next to his bed. The back of his dressing gown must have opened. His bare ass slid on the unnatural smoothness of the molded plastic seat. He had to grab hold of its sides with his hands to keep from falling out.
“You shouldn’t be up,” his mother said. She didn’t sound scandalized. With a child’s squeamishness he had expected her to react prudishly to any discussion of sex.
“Answer me,” Max said in a sigh of exhaustion.
“Sex,” she said wonderingly as if she had just discovered its existence. “It wasn’t that important. I didn’t miss it that much. I’ve read books that say I’m wrong. They say it was important to me,” she said without irony, still wondering. “I missed it sometimes and I—” she met his eyes and caught herself. She didn’t blush, but she smiled slyly and smirked with her curvy lip: “There are ways to have sex by yourself as I’m sure you know, Max.”
“Are you telling me the truth, Mom?” Max felt small and naive looking up at her. He was a middle-aged infant, unable to walk. “Didn’t you live without love for me?”
She considered his question thoughtfully. She frowned a bit, her eyebrows drawing together, but her puffy cheeks stayed smooth and untroubled. “It had nothing to do with you. Aunt Essie thought I should get married — to almost anybody, even a thief — just to get you a father. But you didn’t need a father, Max. ‘My little man,’ your father called you. And you were — long before he died — you were a man.”
“No, I wasn’t,” Max said. He wanted to weep. He couldn’t; his head was too smashed. “You made a mistake. I needed a man to help me carry my grief. And you’ve made a mistake with your daughter. She’s a widow who’s never been married.” There — he had spoken — the terrible secrets were out. He waited for the world to be destroyed.
“I don’t think I made a mistake,” she said easily, evidently unaware Max had dropped his nuclear bomb. She reached for his limp right arm. “Let’s get you back into bed.” She urged him up. “I didn’t want to marry the schnooks who were available. Until this thing happened, Max, until that plane tragedy, you were a fine man. Ask my friends, ask yours, and they’ll tell you — Max Klein is a mensch. So I don’t agree with your opinion of yourself.” She pushed him toward the high hospital bed. Max grabbed for it with the gratitude of a tired swimmer reaching for a life preserver. “As for your sister,” she said, nudging his legs up onto the noisy sheets, “she was damaged by what happened. No question. But she was much younger than you; she had less of your father; and she isn’t pretty and she doesn’t have a good sense of humor. I don’t care what anyone says — it’s a competition out there for men. You don’t have to be a great beauty; you don’t have to be a genius. But you have to have something — maybe even a bad quality, a vicious temper — for men to want to marry you. Maybe because there was no man in the house for her to learn how to entertain — maybe you’re right.” She rolled Max into the bed; he fell face-forward onto the stiff sheets. His sinuses were hot. He wanted to sleep. The planet was pulverized; listening to her rebuild it was exhausting. “I didn’t want to settle. Most marriages are unhappy, Max. Most women hate the lives they live with their men. I know. They call me with their complaints. Many of them bury their husbands and enjoy life for the first time. Your sister doesn’t miss a man. She misses children. I told her — she can have children without a man—”