26
Molly called her mother every day, which was admirable, Freddie thought, and often inconvenient, happening when they both got home from work and should, theoretically, have been talking to each other. Freddie called her father, of course, but not as frequently. Often, when she did call, he wasn’t in his room. He was a social person and he had found several of the ladies of Green Garden willing to be social with him. Her father was so social, Freddie told Joy, that the social worker at Green Garden seemed to devote a good portion of her working life to him. So when Freddie got a call from the social worker telling her that Duncan was feuding with a woman in a room down the hall, Freddie was not surprised.
“He’s become verbally abusive,” the social worker said.
“Oh, that.” Freddie breathed a sigh of relief. “Yes, he told me there’s a lady who shouts at him when he walks by her door.”
“His language is out of bounds.”
“Did he call her a crusty botch of nature? That was always one of his favorites.”
“I don’t think you understand how serious this is. It’s disturbing the entire facility.”
“But that’s from Troilus and Cressida.”
“It was very upsetting for Mrs. Barsky.”
“Mrs. Barsky?” Mrs. Barsky had been his regular dinner partner some weeks back. Now he was sharing his table with another lady. Freddie suggested to the social worker that this shift in dining companions might have something to do with the arguments, but the social worker kept coming back to her father’s elaborate curses.
“He called Mrs. Barsky the slander of her heavy mother’s womb and, let me see, I wrote it down somewhere, here it is: a swollen parcel of dropsies.”
“Henry the Fourth, Part I. You know that’s why I became a Shakespeare scholar? To keep up with him.”
“They’re revving up to kick him out. I can feel it,” she said later to Molly. “He’s making trouble again.”
“At least he enjoys himself.”
But when Molly spoke to Daniel that night, she said, “I know he has a good time, but still, I’m glad Mom’s not a sex maniac like Duncan. She’s so dignified. It does my heart good.”
“We’re lucky we have such a reasonable, levelheaded mother.”
“You’ve done so much, Daniel, to help her get to this point. Going over there every day and everything.”
“Well, so have you. You arranged for Wanda to stay on, you got the Life Alert, you took care of the banking stuff.”
They both smiled, thinking of their mother safe, clean, and comfortable in her apartment, her Life Alert wristband securely fastened.
27
Joy woke up and, as usual, Aaron was dead.
What was coming was clear to her, and it was a vast emptiness, a blank, much like the winter with its white horizon, dense and low, no distance to the sky at all. The emptiness was everywhere, in every room at every hour. She could feel it draining the life out of her until she, too, would be empty. In the shower, she cried because, there, no one could hear her, though she knew there was no one to hear her anywhere.
Molly had gotten her a medical-alert contraption that came with a wristband with a button on it. Sometimes she pushed the button by accident and a man’s voice from the machine asked her if she was all right. It was company.
Wanda stayed on, going home only on the weekends to tend to her alcoholic husband. She made breakfast for Joy. She practically fed it to her with a spoon. Wanda missed Aaron, too. Sometimes they cried together. Sometimes they cleaned drawers.
Walter appeared once to pick up a sweatshirt he’d left behind. He helped her change two burned-out lightbulbs in the kitchen ceiling fixture. He said he would come back and make Foo-foo for her one day. When he left, his absence was acute.
On the weekends, Elvira came at night. Joy would not stay alone. Alone was impossible, it made her shiver, it made her head swim, it made her heart pound, it made her knees buckle, it made her ears ring.
Her children lived in some other world, one that she could see but had left behind, like the wake of a ship. Their lives foamed and splashed while she hurtled forward, away from them, but toward nothing. Well, toward something, and they all knew what that something was.
There wasn’t enough money for Elvira or Wanda. She was spending like a drunken sailor, an old decrepit drunken sailor. The children offered to help pay, which was kind but humiliating. And she knew they couldn’t afford it. An archaeologist and an environmentalist? They were hanging on by a bourgeois thread. She understood she would have to stay alone eventually. She listened to the wind rattle the windows and knew she was abandoned. She told Molly and Daniel she would not be on the dole.
28
The first night alone was long and she paced from the living room to the bedroom in her nightgown, like a ghost, a skinny, crabby old ghost. The sirens wailed outside, and she paced and wept and took her own pulse and used the toilet and ate crackers and knew she would faint. She paced some more, and the streets became quiet, even the sirens stopped, and she took her pulse again, as if her pulse might account for the silence, and paced some more and waited.
What am I waiting for? she wondered. Whatever it was, it was crucial and elusive. She could hardly breathe. She tripped on the edge of the rug in the hall, but did not fall. She lay on the couch and cried, bitterly and loudly. “I don’t care who hears me,” she called out to the empty house.
29
In Los Angeles, it was January and it was springtime. Molly saw a hermit thrush. Hummingbirds flitted in and out of white flowers shaped like bells. Pink buds of jasmine hung over the fence ready to burst into bloom. At the beach, surfers slid into the waves with the garish sunset behind them. Finches began to sing. She took one class to Catalina each week to photograph a cave painting and map the area around it. They used a software program that had originally been developed by NASA for the study of photographs of Mars.
“Mars,” her mother said when Molly told her about the project. “Well, well. Digital tracing. Isn’t that nice.”
“I knew you’d be interested.”
“Oh, of course.”
Molly told her about the bits of ocher the digital tracing had connected, and if her mother sounded less enthusiastic than Molly had expected, Molly attributed that to the weather. The weather was terrible in New York. It snowed and the bitter wind blew, and Joy could not leave her building.
“Well, this will cheer you up, Mom. One of the grad students in engineering built a drone and we attached a 3-D camera and…”
Joy drifted from room to room, listening, aimless, trapped.
It wasn’t that Joy expected her daughter, and certainly not her son, to come live with her. They had their own lives, just as she had once had her own life. She did expect something from them, though, something they were not providing, she couldn’t put her finger on it. Danny was coming once a week for dinner now, Molly planned a trip to New York in the near future, and Joy waited eagerly for their visits. But visits predicted their own end, and an end to a visit meant she would be alone again.
There is a difference between solitude and loneliness, she thought, and wondered what it was.
She should have spent more time with her own mother. She should have moved in with her mother to take care of her, she saw that now. So what if her mother’s apartment had been an L-shaped studio? So what if her mother kept it at 102 degrees and could not stand the smell of any food cooking except white rice, and so what if she talked and talked and talked and lived in the past? Now that Joy was older, she understood her mother. It was cold, that was why the heat in the apartment was turned up so high. Her mother’s ceaseless talking was an activity, a way for her to be alive. As for living in the past, the past was all that was real.