“Dotty? Your door must stay open…who are you?”
“Her son.”
“No, you’re not. Her son is older.” The aide was a middle-aged woman with a round face and wild hair. She looked about to run for a telephone, or a weapon.
“She has three sons. I’m Tim.”
“It’s after visiting hours. How did you get in here?”
“Uh, there was no one at the desk…”
She bustled in and grabbed the handles of my mother’s wheelchair, jerking her around in a rough half-circle. Her white head bobbed, her eyes still closed. “You’ll have to leave. It’s almost time for her bath and brush.”
“She’s my mother…” I felt like a schoolchild, begging to be released to the lavatory.
“You can come and see her tomorrow, in the daytime. Now you’ll have to go.” She stood behind my mother, waiting. “I’ll call security.”
I left. The hall seemed much longer than it had the other times I’d come, and I hurried down it, feeling gawky and stupid, though none of the passing employees paid me the slightest attention.
When I passed the desk attendant, she didn’t know who I was. She told me goodnight.
* * *
I drove around, trying to get lost. It didn’t work. New Jersey is a place of many roads, but no matter which obscure county route I picked, it led me to a familiar place. When at last I emerged into the shimmering Trenton suburbs and decided to make my way back home, I got the disagreeable feeling that I was trapped, that there was no place I could go where I wasn’t precisely the person I’d made myself into, where I hadn’t made the familiar mistakes of my past. Then I remembered my mother and her untethered scattershot of memories and thought I must be the most selfish person the world had ever known.
I wasn’t ready for the house and my brother and my bedroom, so when I pulled into Mixville I passed our driveway and tooled through town. There was not much town to tool through. It was late, and even the teenagers were indoors. A couple of drunks I thought I recognized sat asleep under a public telephone outside Main Street’s only bar.
And then I found myself at the paper mill. I’d snooped around here a few times when I was a kid. I parked the car in a weedy gravel turnout on the opposite side of the street, then walked around the chain-link fence that separated the mill from the world. The fence was topped with razor wire now — that was something new — and choked with dry growth the weedeater couldn’t reach. The boughs of trees hung low over me. I walked hunched.
Finally I came to the riverbank. There was no development here, just the overgrown backyard to the mill, and a lonely line of phone poles stretching into the distance. The mill was dark and silent, but lights and sounds reached me from the Pennsylvania side: another mill there had been gutted and turned into condos, and I could see the orange glow from a barbecue fire and hear the music and voices of a party.
Both mills used to run all night, when I was a kid. I sat in the grass, remembering. And then I got another memory, of fishing in this exact spot, with my father, who wasn’t actually fishing but sitting in a folding beach chair with a bottle and a sketchbook. I didn’t know how to fish and didn’t like it anyway, but my father had bought me the rod and reel because he wanted to do something nice for me, or maybe with me, and so I went along. I sat in the weeds, the pointed ends of grasses working their way into my shorts, and flung worm after worm into the toxic, pulp-thick water, and my father fell asleep.
It wasn’t much fun. I remembered wishing I had brought my baseball card price guide, which I had spent the morning in bed reading. But now it seemed that it must have been the best day of my life, and I was full of regret for not having appreciated it at the time.
twenty-eight
On Saturday morning, after Pierce had left for the Pines, I sat by the phone waiting for the courage to call Susan. Repeatedly it didn’t come. I had slept badly and now, as if under the influence of a hundred cups of coffee, my hands were trembling like belt sanders. I had to keep wiping them on my pants.
I decided to try reverse psychology and made myself some actual coffee. It calmed me some, but in place of my nervousness came strange, shapeless sorrow, which bore down on my head and chest like the onset of a cold. I moved around the house with my mug, trying to soothe the painful spots, but they were difficult to find, and slippery once caught. It struck me that my parents themselves were elusive like that, even when they were alive and whole, as well as now, in memory. If I put my mind to it, it was easy to recall the occasional ugly scene, but mostly, when I thought of them, I thought of archetypes, of cartoons: my mother in her threadbare terry-cloth bathrobe with a drink in her hand, her face bent into a half-lidded, skeptical sneer; my father as a drawing of himself, with the slump, the empty eyeglasses, the cigar. There were no artifacts around the house I could use to prick myself with, nothing either of them had been attached to. There were no family traditions I could feel the loss of. What I did feel was a general and shifting sadness. It was not like a tumor that could be excised or a cut that could heal. It was more like a mildly toxic gas I couldn’t stop breathing, and, with every breath, producing more of.
Why, I wondered, did they have any children, let alone five? Were we their inconvenient remedy to the empty space between them? Did they think they could reach each other over a bridge of kids? It gave me pause to consider that my purpose in life might only have been to shore up a doomed marriage, which in any case was now over. A dire and oversimplified notion, but my present pinnacle of self-negation had not been arrived at by the sober contemplation of life’s complexity.
I got a bus to New York. Once there I would walk somewhere, and probably I would call or visit Susan and make a fool of myself. I began to regret these acts as if I had already performed them. That’s when I remembered Rose and Andrew, and decided that now, with our mother growing increasingly dependent and senile, the time had come to make amends with them. I would call them when I got to the city, and if refused spend the day going to art galleries and drinking iced coffee. Satisfied, I bought a paperback at the station, a murder mystery, to read on the bus, and made a mental pact to enjoy myself no matter the circumstances.
And for the duration of the trip, I did. If I didn’t exactly leave my anxieties at home, I at least was able to set them aside. It was like they were bulky bags filled with pack-ratted garbage, which I could leave in the adjacent seat, lumpy and worn and distantly reassuring, until I found a suitable place to dump them.
* * *
Rose wasn’t listed in the Manhattan phone book, but Andrew was, and it was Andrew I got over the phone from Port Authority. He didn’t seem to know who I was for a moment.
“Tim?” he said.
“Your brother-in-law Tim.”
“Oh! Tim! Well how’s it going?” I liked this about Andrew, his perfect pleasure at hearing from anyone surprising, no matter who it was. It was contagious.
“Oh, it’s going!” I said. “Doing lots of drawing!”
We talked about that for a while, as if we were sitting across from one another in a restaurant. He asked questions and I answered them. I had forgotten how nice it was to be on the less burdensome end of a conversation, so long had I been talking mostly to Pierce and Brad Wurster, and it made me feel uncharacteristically glib, a far cry from the dolt I’d been at the cartoonists’ conference.