My mother shakes her head again, but harder, like a dog shedding water. “You know, I really do have no idea how the pranks started. I think he might have brought her up a cold shrimp platter the first weekend he lived here. As a new-neighbor gesture, you know, not realizing. I don’t think he’d ever met a Jew before, either, let alone known anything about keeping Kosher. But not long after that, she got him the gift subscription to Hustler, with the note that said ‘To go with your shirts.’ Then he hid a bunch of those black, rubber June bugs all over that sukka she put up every year around back, on strings so he could make them scuttle across her little folding picnic table. Do you remember any of that?”
I shake my head. “Just the picnic table. And ears of corn? Did she hang ears of corn in there?”
“He put rubber bugs in those, too. After that, it was on. Seemed like one of them came up with a new torture for the other every single week.”
Instead of smiling some more, my mother starts muttering again. At least now I can hear her. “She was so lonely,” she says. “They both were.” Then some things that I don’t catch. The sky purples over our heads, and the breeze brushes past.
“So, this one time…” I finally prod.
She looks surprised, as though she thought she’d still been talking to me. Her braid swings like the tongue of a bell, and her body vibrates. “Sorry. Yes. This one time. I assume she got the clothes from Madolyn, Tell me you remember Madolyn.”
“Good God, how could I forget them,” I say, and my mother says them right with me, holding her hands a good two feet in front of her breasts, and there we are smiling again. Mother and daughter. We glance together across the street toward Madolyn’s duplex. “You don’t think she still lives there?” I ask.
My mother doesn’t respond.
“Whose ex was she again? The Family Affair guy?”
“Not him. The one from the knock-off. With the beard.”
“Oh my God, Mom, do you remember what she told me? When I was just sitting out here with the turtle, minding my seven year-old business? She came across the street in this tiny black dress, and she had to have been as old as Mr. Busby, right? Sixty, at least.”
“Older,” says my mother.
“So it’s just me and the turtle, looking at the sky. And here comes Madolyn and her shadows. And she stands over us. And she puts her hands right on her boobs. And then she says…” I try for a smoker’s rasp, though it doesn’t quite come off. “ Just remember, Girlie. I got these for the husband. But I kept ’em for me.” And then she turned around and went right back home.”
My mother just nods, and takes a long time doing it. Her voice comes out sad. “That would be Madolyn. She was always so nice.”
Nice?
More silence. Another sudden, nervous glance up in the air from my mother, and I know this can’t last long. “Sorry I interrupted. You said Evie got something from her?”
“Oh. Right. Very possibly the same little black dress you just mentioned.”
“What are you talking about?”
“And some fishnets. And some red lipstick. And some stilettos. Jesus, Ry, they had to have been seven inches high.”
“Wait… she borrowed that stuff for herself? To wear?”
“For Mr. Busby.”
At the gurgle in my throat, my mom actually grins. “It was horrible, really. And ingenious. You wouldn’t think that sweet old woman… Mr. Busby’s daughter was worried about him skulking around here by himself. She got him to take out a Personals ad in the L.A. Weekly. I helped him write it. And then I guess, maybe when I was trying to convince Evie to let me watch her husband sleep for a couple hours so she could go out and see a movie or something some evening, I must have let it slip. And that’s what gave her the idea, which is why it was kind of my fault.”
“You’re telling me she answered his ad?”
“Made a date, told him she’d be by to pick him up. She didn’t tell him who she was, of course.”
“She actually went through with it? Went to his door dressed like that? What did he do?”
“I don’t know, exactly. That is, I couldn’t quite see. She made Madolyn and me hide in the hedge. All I could hear over our laughter was his screaming.”
“That’s…” I start, and don’t know how to continue. I want to keep her talking about this forever, or at least long enough for me to get the picture straight in my head. Not of Evie, but of my mother crouched in a hedge with a friend, laughing. “I can’t believe you haven’t told me this before.”
I know it’s the wrong comment even before I finish. My mom’s mouth twists, and her shoulders clench inward. She folds her arms across her chest.
“What happened after that?” I keep my voice light.
“Stan died,” says my mother.
The sun goes, dragging all that color behind it, and around us, the apartment buildings lose their depth like false fronts on a set. Across the street is Beverly Hills. A whole other world. You can tell by the curlicues on the street signs.
Without warning, my mother starts to swell. Her arms come loose and drop to her sides, and her spine arches and her head tilts all the way back as her mouth falls open. The moan seems to surge out of the grass and up her throat, rattling her teeth as it bursts out of her.
“Mom,” I gasp, grabbing for her hand, scrambling up on my knees to try getting an arm around her.
The moan stops. My mother holds her position, completely frozen, like a sculpture of my mother moaning. Then her eyes pop open.
“Do you remember that sound, Ry?”
“Remember it? What the hell are you—”
“You don’t,” she says. “I’m glad.” Then she folds her arms back across her chest and lowers her chin and sits there, holding herself. “I’m so glad.”
Usually, by this point on our Sunday evenings, I’ve dutifully offered up the most innocuous details of my work life and my grad-school plans and my relationship with Danny (since I have no intention of actually bringing Danny), for which my mother trades seemingly grateful nods and sometimes an anecdote about women’s feet from the shoe store where she works. Most weeks, she doesn’t break down, especially if I have her back in her apartment and ensconced in front of her Tivo’d American Idol episodes — all of which she also watched when they were first broadcast — by eight. This is the first night in years where I’ve lost track of the time, even for a little while. And yet, I’m all too aware we’re on dangerous ground.
“Do you want to go home?” I ask gently. I even touch her shoulder, and she doesn’t pull away, though she also doesn’t unclench.
“It usually started around 2 a.m.,” she says. “Sometimes earlier than that. Mostly not, though. You really don’t remember?” There are no tears, now, just a gauntness that seems to have surfaced in her chin and cheeks.
This is what she’ll look like, old, I think, for no good reason.
“The most amazing thing is that I really think she had no idea she was doing it. I think she did it in her sleep. By the third or fourth night after Stan died, I couldn’t sleep at all for knowing it was coming. Somehow, being woken up by that, to that… it was just too much world, too fast.
“There wasn’t any lead up. It came like an earthquake. That sound I just made, only a lot louder. And a thousand times as heartbroken. It went on and on and on, like she didn’t even need to breathe. Then it would stop for maybe an hour, and then there’d be aftershocks, these quicker, more jagged moans. Those were so loud that that suspended light in my bedroom started swinging back and forth. You couldn’t drown them out. I tried the fan. I tried headphones. Nothing worked. It was like they’d crawled inside my head.