At my own house that morning, I had methodically dusted the clear-glass globes and painted wooden herons I’d strung from invisible thread over the bedroom window. Now, in my mind, the spread wings of these birds fluttered like a warning. I would be a different person when I saw them next.
I looked at the clock over the kitchen doorway. It was after six. Somehow more than an hour had passed since I’d spoken to Mrs. Leverton.
I stopped for a second, holding on to my mother’s body, and imagined Emily and her husband, John, climbing the stairs with their children, John taking Jeanine, who, at four, was the heavier of the two, and Emily cradling the two-year-old Leo. I thought of the sometimes successful Christmas presents I’d sent over the years: the pink and blue PJs with boots were a hit; the hard-knocking marbles-on-string game was judged age-inappropriate.
I stood up with the thought of Leo in his crib to bolster me, but then came its companion memory of my mother, her arms outstretched to hold him, allowing him to fall.
After positioning her body closer to the stove, I turned to run the water in the sink as cold as it would come. Again and again I took water in my hands and brought it up to my face, never splashing, exactly, but pressing my cheeks into the shallow puddles that remained in my palms. On hot nights, my ex-husband, Jake, had taken ice cubes and run them along my shoulder and back, curving them onto my stomach and up to my nipples until goose bumps covered my limbs.
I unwrapped the blankets from my mother’s body. First the red and rough Hudson Bay and then the softer white Mexican wedding cotton. I walked around her body, pulling each corner taut. The downy towel remained on her face.
Leo did not bounce, as my mother confessed she thought he might, but his fall was broken by the edge of a dining room chair. Though he will have a scar on his forehead to mark the moment for the rest of his life, that chair may have saved him. Otherwise it would have been the much harder floor. My mother’s face that day was surprised and hurt. Emily had blamed her, wrapped the bawling Leo in a blue fleece blanket, and called her horrible names. I stood between them and then followed Emily down the steep walkway to my car. I did not glance back to see if my mother was watching us from her door.
“Never again,” Emily said. “I’m tired of making excuses for her.”
“Of course,” I said. “Yes,” I said. “I know the way,” I said, and got in the driver’s side of my car. I drove more competently that day than I ever have, all the way to Paoli Hospital, going at top speed along winding roads.
I took my mother’s skirt and flipped it up to reveal her calves and knees, her fleshy thighs. The scent of her earlier mishap flooded me.
“The legs go last,” my mother said once. We sat in front of the television, watching Lucille Ball. Ball’s hair, by then, was so red and false it looked more like Bozo’s blood sample than Bozo’s wig. She wore a specially tailored tuxedo jacket that created a largish hourglass shape and went down low in the back, but her legs, fishnet clad and decked out in high heels, went on and on.
I remembered calling home once from Wisconsin. Emily must have been almost four. My father answered the phone, and immediately I heard it.
“What’s wrong, Daddy?”
“Nothing to get upset about.”
“You sound strange. What is it?”
“I fell,” he said.
I could hear the grandfather clock in their living room-its deep choral chimes.
“Are you lying down?”
“I’ve got that old quilt on top of me, and your mother is doing her best. Here she is.”
I heard the receiver being fumbled, and I entered the anxious no-man’s-land over the wire while my mother came to get the phone.
“He’s fine,” she said immediately. “He’s just drugged up.”
“Can I talk to him again?”
“He’s a horrid conversationalist right now,” she said.
I asked my mother what exactly had happened.
“He tripped on the stairs. Tony Forrest came over and took him to the doctor. It’s his hip and those damn varicose veins. Tony says Edna St. Vincent Millay killed herself that way.”
“With varicose veins?”
“No, stairs. She fell down them.”
“Can I speak to him?”
“You should call later in the week. He’s resting now.”
I felt the distance of miles then. I tried to picture my father under the memory quilt, sleeping, as my mother bustled about the house, making meals out of dry cereal flakes and canned corn.
I was sweating in the closed-up house but too afraid to open a window. Too afraid another death rattle might escape my mother’s lungs and seep into the air and wake the women who, like my mother, lived alone and feared such things. The nighttime intruder who comes and kills you. The dutiful daughter who suddenly finds her hand on top of a towel on top of your face, smashing that face in, something inside her hammering over and over again with a child’s vendetta finally fulfilled.
I turned on the tap in the kitchen sink again. I waited for the water to heat. I saw the dishes from the early morning washed and put in the dish rack by Mrs. Castle and wondered what made her keep coming to a house like my mother’s to help an old woman as the days, then years, passed by.
The Castles had moved to the neighborhood when I was ten. Mrs. Castle became known as the handiest wife while her husband was considered the handsomest man. When the two of them would visit our house to take away the rocking horses for the church fair, my mother and father would sit in the living room with them, each of my parents happily distracted-my father with Mrs. Castle and my mother with Mr. Castle, or Alistair, as she called him, the last syllable when she pronounced it sounding wistful, as if his name were a synonym for regret.
I suddenly knew what I would do. I would clean my mother as I had intended to, but this time without the possibility of protest, without her eyes clicking open like an ancient baby doll’s, the starburst blue glass an instant indictment. I did not care anymore about the watery mess it might make on the floor. The critic was dead. Carpe diem!
I leaned down to my right and opened the old metal cabinet. Inside were enough saved-from-the-grocery plastic containers, with their bowed companion tops, to store the hearts and lungs of every citizen along Phoenixville Pike. But I was searching for something else. Something very specific in my memory. I burrowed in and tossed the plastic containers to the side and out the front until, in the very back, where no one had been in years, I found the saved-from-the-hospital sick bowl I was looking for.
It was a pale aqua-green, the color of the surgeon’s scrubs. Seeing it again sent shivers down my spine. “He almost died” was always the last line of the story told. It had taken me years to wonder why, if the story was about my father, my mother always ended up as the main character.