When she had buttered the toast, she took it with her into the hallway. There she picked up the telephone and dialed Mary’s number. Lines whirred and snapped into action halfway across the continent. The phone rang several times at the other end, and then Mary said, “Hello?”
“Oh, Mary,” said Mrs. Emerson, as if she had forgotten whom she was calling. “How are you, dear?”
“Oh, fine,” said Mary, and waited.
“How wonderful about the vacation,” said her mother.
“Yes, isn’t it?”
“And no children along.”
“No.”
“You’ll be leaving them behind.”
“Well, I don’t see what’s so wrong about that,” Mary said. “You and Daddy went off sometimes. It’s not as if—”
“No, no, it’s a fine idea,” said Mrs. Emerson. “I think it’s just fine.”
“Well, then.”
“Now that you mention it though,” Mrs. Emerson said, “do you have someone to stay with the children?”
“Oh, yes, that’s all taken care of.” “No problem there, then.”
“Oh, no.”
“I see. Of course, if it’s settled,” Mrs. Emerson said. “But you know I’m willing to help out with them if I’m needed.”
“Thank you, Mother. I think we can manage.”
“Oh. All right.”
“We’ll leave them with Morris’s mother, and that way there’ll be less—”
“Morris’s mother!” Mrs. Emerson said. She put her other hand to the receiver. “But she gets to see them all the time!”
“All the more reason,” said Mary. “They’re more used to her. We have to think of the children’s side of this.”
“But I am,” Mrs. Emerson said. She picked up a ballpoint pen and bent over the telephone pad, although there was nothing she wanted to write down. Her voice was soft and feathery. No one hearing it would have guessed how tightly she held the pen. “It’s for the children that I want to come, after all,” she said.
“Yes, but with Pammie in this nightmare-stage, one more trauma is all she—”
Mrs. Emerson drew a straight slash across the pad and straightened up. “You have just said a word which I utterly despise,” she said.
“Now, Mother—”
“I loathe it. I detest it. Traumas. How much harm can it do them to see their grandmother once in a while? How long has it been, after all? I so seldom—”
“It’s been seven weeks,” said Mary. “In the past year you’ve paid us four visits, and all but one lasted nearly a month.”
“There, now. See?” said Mrs. Emerson. “You don’t make sense. First you say the children aren’t used to me and then you say I’m around all the time.”
She smiled brightly at her wavery yellowed reflection in the antique mirror. Her hair clung to her forehead, which was damp. Although she wasn’t hot, a flush of some sort was rising from her collarbones. She undid the top button of her blouse.
“It’s not my fault I’m not making sense,” Mary said. Her voice was younger and higher; she sounded as if she were back at that terrible time in her teens, when all she seemed to do was cry and throw tantrums and pick out her mother’s niggling faults. “Mother, can’t you stand on your own feet any more? You’re out here all the time, and every visit you make I have the feeling you might not go home again. You get so settled. You seem so permanent. You act as if you’re taking over my household.”
“Why, Mary,” Mrs. Emerson said. She laid her fingers to her throat, which was tightening and cutting off her breathing. “Where could you get such a thought? Don’t you see how careful I am to be a good guest? I help out with the chores, I give you and Morris a little time alone when he comes home in the evenings—”
“You circle around whatever room we’re in, clearing your throat. You throw out all our food and buy new stuff from the health store. You make a point of learning the mailman’s name and the milkman’s schedule and the garbage days, as if you were moving in. You send my clothes to the laundry to save me ironing when ironing is something I enjoy, you buy curtains I can’t live with and hang them in the dining room, you string Geritol bottles and constipation remedies all across my kitchen table—”
“Well, if I’d only—”
“Then you go off to Margaret’s and spoil little Susan rotten. She told me so.”
“Oh, this is unfair!” said Mrs. Emerson. “How was I to know, if no one tells me?”
“Why should we have to tell you?”
“Well, now that I’ve heard,” said Mrs. Emerson, getting a tighter grip on her voice, “you’ll have no further cause for complaint. I certainly won’t be troubling you again.”
“I might have known you’d take it that way,” said Mary.
“Well, what am I supposed to say? Anything I do is wrong. I shouldn’t visit, I shouldn’t not visit. What, then, Mary? Why are my children so un — un—?”
Her tongue stopped working. It jerked and died. Her throat made an involuntary clicking sound that horrified her. She dropped the receiver, letting it swing over the edge of the table. “Mother?” Mary’s voice said, tinnily. Long cold fingers of fear were closing around Mrs. Emerson’s chest. She buckled her shaking knees and slid to the floor. Then, like a very poor actor performing an artificial death, she felt her way to a prone position and lay staring up at the underside of the table. “Mother, what is it?” Mary said. The swinging receiver was nauseating to watch. Mrs. Emerson closed her eyes and felt herself draining away.
When she looked up at the table again it seemed darker, clustered with spinning black specks. Was she going blind? She tried to work her arms, but only one responded. It moved to touch the other, which felt dead and cold and disgusting. She was dying in pieces, then. How fortunate that she had got the children grown before this happened. They were grown, weren’t they? Weren’t they? There seemed to be one baby left over. But when she tried to picture him she realized that she had never seen him; he was that poor little soul born dead, between Melissa and Peter. Well, but it was logical that she should have thought of him; she was going to heaven to meet him, after all. So some people said. Only he had managed alone so long, and the ones left here needed her so much more. How could she bear to look down and see her poor, unsatisfied children struggling on without her? And don’t tell her she wouldn’t see them. If heaven was where people stopped being concerned with such things then no woman would be happy there.
The undersurface of the table was rough and unfinished, a cheat. From above, it had always been so beautifully polished. In one corner a carpenter’s pencil had scrawled the number 83, and she spent a long time considering its significance. Her mind kept floating away from the problem, like a white balloon. She kept reaching out and grabbing it back by the string. Then she saw a small gray brain, a convoluted bulb growing on the inner side of one table leg. Shock caused new chills to grip her chest, before she realized that she was looking at a chewed piece of gum. Chewing gum. She saw cheerful rows of green and pink and yellow packets strung across the candy counter at the Tuxedo Pharmacy. She saw her children snapping gum as they came in for supper, a nasty habit. Chewing open-mouthed, on only one side, their faces peaceful and dreamy. Laying little gray wads on the rims of their plates before they unfolded their napkins. How often had she told them not to do that? The wads cooled and hardened; Margaret, her sloppiest child, would pry hers off the plate and pop it back in her mouth when she had finished eating. Was it Margaret who had stuck chewing gum to her mother’s walnut table?