“Boy,” she said. “They let you dress like that in church?”
I had dressed, unconsciously, in what Susan had worn the day before: cutoff jeans and a white shirt. “I didn’t go to church.”
“It’s Sunday!”
Pierce spoke up now, almost at a whisper. “Mom, how are you?”
“Seems like I’m everybody’s mother.”
“Uncle Pierce,” said Samantha. “Are you sick?”
“Samantha!” Nancy said. To my utter astonishment, she reached out and slapped Sam full in the face, letting off a sound like a dropped volume of an encyclopedia. Nobody said anything. Samantha did not cry. I hugged the paper bag tighter to my chest, and it crinkled hollowly.
“What in the hell was that?” my mother said.
“I haven’t been feeling too well, no,” Pierce said. “But I’m a lot better today. Nancy,” he said, turning, “don’t ever hit a person for my benefit.”
“It has nothing to do with you,” Bobby said.
Nancy didn’t speak, but her expression betrayed a kind of horror at what had transpired. The guilty hand covered her mouth and she took a deep breath around it. Everything about her said I’m sorry and everything about Bobby — the deepening folds of his chin, his thick hands spanning his knees — said don’t apologize. Samantha’s face bore the handprint in deep, livid red.
I broke the silence by holding up my paper bag. “Mom,” I said. “I brought you some food. I was thinking maybe we could take you out to Wash Crossing for a little picnic. Do you think they’d let us do that?”
She smiled politely. “You’re so nice to invite me on a picnic,” she said.
Bobby said, “This isn’t your day to visit, Tim.”
Nancy, with a sound that nearly made me hit the ceiling, cracked her knuckles.
Samantha excused herself and got up to leave the room. Nobody stopped her. After a moment Nancy followed, offering Pierce and me a varnished smile on her way past.
“I’ll check on springing her,” Pierce said, and left.
My mother, alone with her oldest sons, looked blithely at us as if we were handsome strangers. “I’m interested in this picnic,” she said. “Are both of you fellows coming along?”
“Mom,” I said, sitting down. “It’s Tim.” I took her hand. Bobby looked down at the entwined hands, curious and slightly disgusted, as if they were a pair of trysting housepets. “I was here a couple weeks ago. We’ve been talking on the phone.”
“Of course,” she said, obviously lying.
“She isn’t going to remember,” Bobby said.
I didn’t look at him. “That’s okay.”
Pierce returned with the news that, though they would let us take her out, we had to have her back by lunchtime.
“But we’re going to eat lunch,” I said.
“Yeah, well. They said the food wasn’t the point.”
“I’m very excited,” said my mother, her eyes gleaming.
“She needs structure,” Bobby said. “That’s what that’s all about. Or else she forgets herself. She gets sad.”
“Do you want to come along?” I said to him. He seemed possessed by a deep misery that I was afraid to touch, for fear it might rub off on me.
I think he did want to come. But he didn’t look at me as he said no.
* * *
The nursing home let us take a wheelchair. Apparently she wasn’t standing up on her own at all lately, and Pierce and I had to lift her by the elbows and maneuver her into the seat. She seemed very small there. We rolled her out to the car and helped her in. “Are you comfortable?” I asked her, buckling her up.
“Oh, yes. This is a nice car.”
“It was Dad’s, do you remember?”
She frowned. “Dad didn’t drive, now did he?”
I wondered who she was talking about: her own father? I had not met him, as he had died before I was born, or very soon after, I couldn’t recall. “I don’t remember,” I said. It was strange to me that she could be so incoherent today after the relative sharpness of two weeks before. It was easy enough to extrapolate into the not-so-distant future. What would go next? There were not many parts of her left to fail.
Pierce, sitting in the back of the car with the wheelchair, seemed to be thinking the same thing. The three of us were silent for most of the drive. My mother’s head swiveled, her eyes flickering over the landscape like searchlights, seeming less to take it in than to project onto it. What they were projecting I couldn’t figure. What did this stretch of road mean to her now? What, for that matter, did it mean before? I realized that a large part of my family past, which had meant nothing to me before, was lost to me.
It seemed like my family had always been a clean slate, its future hazy and irrelevant and its past nonexistent. I remembered arriving at college to find my fellow freshmen embroiled in heated discussions about their various ethnic and geographical backgrounds, as if it were imperative that these details become a part of public record, as if without them it would be impossible to be themselves. I felt out of place and slightly snubbed, though never jealous, precisely. Amazed was more like it, the way I might have been if I had found they were able to see more colors than I could, or breathe underwater. Family history was a novel, if worthless, principle, as far as I was concerned. Until recently, that is.
But now I was feeling more left out than ever. I thought about the paltry breakup story I had told Susan, how it was likely to be the most fleshed-out account of anything worth hearing that I could offer her. I wondered, dimly, why she seemed to like me at all, and if perhaps I had overestimated her opinion of our friendship, when in fact it was simply a diverting function of her job as my editor.
Despite my impression that FunnyFest had drained the recreation from every town for miles around, Washington Crossing Park was quite crowded. We had to push my mother’s wheelchair over several hundred yards of footpath to find a pleasant enough tree to sit under. It struck me that we hadn’t brought a blanket: no use worrying now. For her part, my mother settled nicely into the entire situation, as if it were a weekly occurrence, which as far as I knew it could be. She sat placidly in the wheelchair, moving her fingers in her lap much like Pierce had back on the day of the funeral. There was a briskness to her, in her bright dress and clear gaze, that belied her condition, a simple economy that made me feel clunky and gratuitous for being able to walk, to remember, to carry on a conversation. I gave her half a sandwich, and she ate a little bit, spilling a few ingredients onto her dress. I picked them off for her. Pierce, seeing she wouldn’t finish, made short work of the other half-sandwich.
My mother was frowning. “What do you call it when you think you remember something?”
Silence. “I don’t know,” I said.
“You know, I’ve-seen-this-all-before.”
“Oh! Déjà vu!”
“Yes,” she said, “of course.” Then, for a long time, she didn’t say anything at all. Pierce and I waited. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply. The frown lines smoothed. Finally Pierce went back to eating.
“Were you going to say that this was all familiar to you?” I said. “This park?”
She didn’t open her eyes. “Oh, yes. You boys, this park, that deer, over there in the trees.” She pointed toward the park entrance, where a convenience store and gas station were set back from the road.
I looked harder for the deer, knowing it wasn’t there but feeling no less inept for not seeing it. What I could see, with a sudden exactness, was myself, the way she was seeing me: a bare outline, shaped like a man, into which any memory or desire — or, in their absence, nothing — could be poured. “Mom, do you remember us?” I asked her. “You remembered me last time.” I felt Pierce’s hand on my arm. “Don’t you remember us at all, your sons Tim and Pierce? Mom?” I realized I had raised my voice. “Mom?” I said.