But — maybe obvious to say — who can say what she was dreaming.
My father met the nurse at a convention. I imagine them talking beneath the ballroom chandelier. My father says, What's black and white and red all over. She says, What. He says, A newspaper. She doesn't get it. He says, A nun with a spear though her chest. She says, You're awful, laughing and smacks his arm. He says, A penguin who's been shot. She says, You're killing me, and covers her mouth. She's wearing white stockings. My father gets her number. She becomes his lifelong friend.
Then my mother gets sicker.
A good thing the nurse coming in to care for my mother.
A fluke the nurse becoming my father's girlfriend.
I once said to my shrink, I never went to see my mother before she died.
I said, How do you feel about that.
When my brother went, he stood by her bed.
He called me and said, It's not even her.
So why should I visit, I thought.
My brother said she ate crumbled toast. Her mouth was always open wide. She lay, curled, unmoving, on the hospital bed they had rented and set up in the living room.
Like a fucking table, my brother said.
We just sit around it, he said.
From the floor I told my shrink about my swimsuit. It didn't fit, and I feared the men would laugh.
She said, There's no time now.
She said, Can this wait until Wednesday.
It was Friday. I would see her Wednesday after work. But there were days to get through before then. And I wanted something on the phone.
I said, But my father and brother always laughed.
I now owned a beachrobe.
She said, Can it wait.
In the beginning, I went to the convention, truth be told, to look at men. To pick up men.
I cared less about the convention itself, its topic I mean, and more about picking up men in suits. I wanted something lifelong.
I drank with men in cocktail lounges at the ends of days.
But they were the dullest men, convention die-hards, and I spent most nights in my room alone, watching TV
Once I called my brother from Kansas City. I said, Guess where I am.
He said, You're desperate for friends.
He said, You're becoming you-know-who.
In the rooms our suitcases spilled out onto the floor. My brother's model plane parts were spread about. The glue he used made my head come unhinged. It felt like being underwater.
So I suppose I should have liked this.
Underwater was no sound, no light.
Above water was a mess.
My father used to say about my mother, She can't let things go.
She couldn't let things go.
What things.
This and that.
He traveled a lot. He smelled of smoke.
But she let the big thing go, you know.
My father said this. She let the big thing go, Ha ha.
No one thought this was funny. Not even he did after he said it.
When my mother got sicker, my father called the nurse he liked the most. She kept my mother drugged as my father said to do. The drugs dripped into my mother's arm. My mother said some of the strangest things. My father called to tell me what.
He laughed and I could hear the nurse laughing in the background.
I said, What the hell's so funny.
He said, You have no sense of humor.
Perhaps this was true.
A man who had bent my ear in the ballroom with jokes approached me poolside. I was removing my terrycloth beachrobe. He said, I've got a good one.
After each joke he said, Do you get it, and poked me in the ribs.
But I didn't get it.
And each time he poked me in the ribs, I felt my ribs and what my ribs were supposed to be protecting, and the terror of this.
That ribs protect organs. Skin protects ribs. Hair protects skin. And then what.
There was a day, sitting on the edge of a bed, my father and mother and brother on the beach, the TV on, the model glue in its tiny tube just across the room.
I uncapped the glue tube and breathed in the fumes, and deeply I should say, and my head went murky, swimming in black.
I tried calling girls from back home, but I couldn't get my head to clear, so I threw several of my brother's model planes, still wet with glue and paint, through the hotel room window.
I didn't think they would fly, but I wondered how they would crash.
But to my surprise they flew.
Often the phone rang when I was in my shrink's office, and I always knew when the phone was ringing though she kept the ringer off.
I knew the phone was ringing because a red light on the phone would blink, and it made me just wild to see the light.
Often I said, Your phone is ringing.
My shrink said, Can you try to ignore it.
But I stared at the light until it stopped blinking.
I know I should at least have tried to ignore it.
But it could have been a friend or her mother or some die-hard patient desperate for who knows what.
My shrink said, What does this mean to you.
It meant something dull, like who was I and what was life.
I said, It means your phone is ringing.
I watched as my brother dumped butterflies, dead, from a plastic bag.
He pushed straight pins straight through their center parts and stuck them to a piece of board.
I suppose he should have preserved them in some way. Their wings, eventually, dropped off in powdery bits.
When my father called and said, I'm sorry, I said, What did you do.
He said, Your mother died.
He said, Where have you been.
I said, At the convention.
He said, That's my girl.
My brother and the nurse had carried my mother's body out to the lawn on the bed.
My brother called and told my machine, We put her on the fucking lawn.
I heard him say this in real time. I was reading a magazine.
He didn't want me to know he was crying.
I read an article on weight loss. It suggested exercise and low fat foods.
My brother never liked me to know he was crying. When a wave knocked him down, he pretended the water stung his eyes.
I would laugh and run to the room. From the room I called the girls. First one then another then another.
I said, I'm calling from the beach, when there was a beach.
And they always found ways to disconnect.
And my brother would find me. And I'd call him baby. And he'd pin me to the floor.
My brother had said, It's not even her.
I said, Sometimes I'm not even me.
He said, What does that mean.
I said, I'm thinking of seeing a shrink.
He said, You're thinking of buying a friend.
But I was feeling something. Or I was feeling nothing.
This is how it starts.
One year at the convention, I met a man who seemed less dull than the others.
His suit looked less pathetic, his shoes better groomed, and we had a nice talk as we walked through the ballroom collecting things from tables into our tote bags.
We had a private dinner in the hotel, and he told me I had quite a body, and I said nothing, looked at the table, and he laughed at something, perhaps at how I had become a girl.
Truth be told, I felt like a girl, covering my face with my hand and laughing.
His body was average, his face as well, and at some point — I'll just say it — I learned about his wife and kids.
I learned the hard way, or was it the easy way, when, in his bed, his wife called and he picked up and said, Hi honey, and, Yes baby, and pinched different sections of my skin.