I filled the small container with near scalding water and squeezed in a little dish soap. If my mother was greasy, this soap promised to lift it right off her! I shut the water off, took the dish sponge and dish towel, and knelt to my task.
I would start at the bottom and work my way up.
I peeled off my mother’s blue men’s orthopedic anti-embolism socks and balled them up, resisting an urge to lob them over her body and through the small back hallway that led into the living room. With aim and enough upper-body strength, I could have landed them among the balls of yarn in the basket beside her wing chair. Instead, I placed them to the side, to be dealt with later.
There were her toes, delicate when exposed. I had seen them intimately now for years. Mrs. Castle couldn’t be asked to trim her toenails, and so, once a month on a Sunday, I arrived for the tasks of ancillary body maintenance, cleaning and trimming the places my mother had ceased being able to reach. Attending to her feet gave us a peculiar way to revisit the past, a repositioning in which I, by being silent, disappeared from the room, my whole body acting merely as her own hand had once acted. I painted her toenails a coral color from Revlon that, if not an exact match for the one she had applied once a week for forty years, was so close it drew no comment or objection.
I started with her feet by taking the dish towel and dipping it in the scalding water, wringing it out, and wrapping first one foot and then the other. Like a pedicurist, I worked one foot while the other was moistening. With the dish sponge-soft or rough side, depending-I scrubbed and buffed. On my mother’s legs I saw the veins I knew lived beneath my own skin and that had recently begun to peek out behind my knees and shins.
“You have murdered your mother, true, but we find her exceptionally clean!” I saw it being sung as if in a musical, where witches held up apples and swung on ropes by their necks.
“It’s a hard day, Helen,” my mother would say.
“It will be okay, sweetheart,” my father would say.
On the day my father died, I had arrived at the house to the sight of my mother cradling his head in her lap at the bottom of the stairs. In the weeks that followed, she talked over and over again about his varicose veins and how much pain they had caused him. How he was stiff in the mornings and often stumbled or tripped over the smallest wrinkle in the carpet. She repeated stories of his clumsiness over the phone to the grocer, who still delivered food to her, and to Joe, my father’s barber, whom she had called in a deluded moment after she’d called me. Joe had shown up shortly after I had, worried that my mother might be all alone. He had stood in the front doorway, his mouth open, unable to speak. When our eyes met, he lifted his hand up and accurately made the sign of the cross before turning to leave. Was it from respect or fear that Joe had never commented on the open cleft at the back of my father’s head or the arc of blood against the wall?
Slowly I worked my way up to my mother’s knees. “They smile at me,” Mr. Donnellson whispered to me once, delighted to catch a rare glimpse of my mother in shorts.
A few moments later, I was wiping the shit from my mother’s rubbery thighs when I thought of the night my father nailed, straight into a wall upstairs, a list of hastily written rules:
Keep the Upstairs Linen Closet Locked
Do Not Leave Matches in the House
Monitor Booze
It took me a moment, as I thought of the tussles my father and mother frequently had-her in her nightgown and my father still dressed in his workday clothes-to realize that someone was pounding on the front door. I froze. I listened to the brass knocker sound against its base.
I made no noise. I could feel the soapy water seep from the sponge and roll down my arm from wrist to elbow. The small splash of a drop back into the old sick bowl was like a bomb exploding in an open field.
The knocker sounded again. This time there was a rhythm to it, like a friendly, half-familiar song.
In the silence that followed, I was aware of my muscles as I sometimes was when modeling. To hold a pose for a long time, the body had to work its way into stillness-it couldn’t be frozen suddenly and kept that way. I tried, as I sensed the person standing on the other side of the door, to imagine myself at Westmore, on top of the art studio’s carpeted platforms. My toes burrowed into the mottled brown shag while my elbows, long since inured to carpet burns, supported me.
Again the knocker sounded. Again the happy tune. It was “shave and a haircut, two bits,” but this time it was followed by an insistent bang, bang, bang.
I realized whoever it was had been giving my mother time to get to the door between knocks one and two, and even between knocks two and three. It was late, after all. She was an old woman. I stared down at her. She could be sleeping with her gown pushed up around her hips.
“Mrs. Knightly?”
It was Mrs. Castle.
“Mrs. Knightly, it’s Hilda Castle. Are you in there?”
Where else would she be? I thought with annoyance. She’s lying on her kitchen floor. Go away!
Then I heard a rattling on the front window in the living room. The noise of her heavy platinum wedding band against the glass. I had asked her once why she continued wearing it after her divorce. “It reminds me not to remarry,” she said.
Only when I heard her voice-a loud whisper-did I realize she had pushed the window open from the outside.
“Helen,” she whispered loudly. “Helen, can you hear me?”
Bitch! I immediately thought in solidarity with my mother. What right had she to lift the window sash?
“I know you’re here,” she whispered. “I see your car.”
How very Lord Peter Wimsey of you, I thought.
But my muscles relaxed as I heard the window closing. A few seconds later, I heard Mrs. Castle regain the concrete pathway. I looked at my mother’s feet and legs.
“What did you have to give away to her?” I asked. I wasn’t thinking of possessions but of the privacy that had always been so precious to my mother. That she had exchanged for the security of Mrs. Castle’s daily visit.
I knew that Mrs. Castle would be back in the morning. I knew it as surely as her whispers had caught at my ankles like ropes.
It was obvious that I needed help. I got up slowly and stepped over my mother’s body to the phone. I breathed in and closed my eyes. I could see, projected, a reel of film in which the sped-up figures of neighbors and police all clambered into the house. There would be so many of them that they would get stuck in the doors and windows, their limbs jutting out in bent, awkward poses like a group of Martha Graham dancers, only squished together by doorjamb and window sash, and dressed in uniforms or perma-creased tweeds.
I have never liked the phone. Ten years ago, during a misguided fit of self-improvement, I pasted smiley-face stickers on the phone in my bedroom and on the one in the kitchen. Then I typed out two labels and taped them to the handsets. “It’s an opportunity, not an attack,” they read.