I look at my fingers, which are longer than I remember them. They look fragile, and thin. From now on I’ll be more careful, I think.
I look at my mother again.
There’s no blood.
It’s as if her wrists have sucked the hands into their sockets like something stared at too long, sealed up cleanly in two sealed eyes.
PHIL’S MOTHER SEARCHES THE ROOM WITH HER EAR, COCKING her head, moving it from side to side. “Do you hear that?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “Hear what?”
“It sounds like scratching,” she says, then makes the sound, “Scratch, scratch, scratch.”
“The furnace?” I offer, but she seems unconvinced.
“No,” she says. “It’s electrical. Like radio static. But regular. Rhythmical.”
Phil looks annoyed: One good thing about having a blind mother is being able to roll your eyes right at her without getting slapped. Mrs. Hillman’s face is pointed in his direction, but she can’t see his expression—the boredom and total irritation with which he glares at her.
Still, I’m embarrassed for Mrs. Hillman. I look at her feet. Shoeless, in beige panty hose, they look a bit like Cornish hens, or fists—gnarled, with crooked, plucked wings. Her legs aren’t long enough for those feet to touch the carpet as she sits back in my mother’s stiff armchair, which also has stunted wings. She’s a small woman, with drab curls. No makeup. She’s wearing a housedress with big brown flowers on it—who ever saw a brown flower?—as if the garden’s gone stale, all the roses overdone by sun or rusted in the rain, the gardener having long ago defaulted on his obligations.
Perhaps the salesgirls had a big, silent laugh behind the cash register as the blind lady bought that dress.
Mrs. Hillman is nothing like the other mothers in Garden Heights with their chunky gold jewelry, their designer slacks. She’s nothing like my mother, who, despite her fondness for Phil, couldn’t stand Mrs. Hillman.
“I know the new neighbors,” I said one evening, trying to sound casual. Mrs. Lefkowsky, who’d lived next door to us all the years we’d lived in Garden Heights, had died. It was winter then, too, and a damp snow had begun to fall outside—big, white flakes in the pewter blue 5 P.M. sky. My mother was coming in from outside, and I could see that snow behind her when she opened the front door and stepped into the living room, a blanket of it covering Garden Heights with a camouflage of purity. Some of it was in her hair.
Next door, Mrs. Lefkowsky’s porch light was on, but, of course, no one was home. She’d been dead for a month. The shades were pulled in each of her square windows, as if to separate the dark emptiness on the outside from the dark emptiness inside. Snow had buried her front steps, too—cloaked the roof in white corpse hair, and I remembered my mother’s bitter adages about snow, quotations taken from her own mother:
The farmer’s wife in heaven is plucking her white hen.
Or, God is beating his angels again.
I thought of our dead neighbor, Mrs. Lefkowsky, wearing a pair of skeletal wings in a frenetic afterlife. God going after her with his fists. A flurry of spine and feathers, which turned silver, then grizzled, as they hit the ground.
We hadn’t liked her much, or thought about her often—Mrs. Lefkowsky. She was just the Daffodil Lady, the Widow Next Door. And then she died, and her daughter, along with her stubby husband, pulled up in a U-Haul and hauled her things away. My mother and I watched them from the kitchen window one Saturday afternoon. They were bundled in down jackets, stumbling across the front yard as they struggled with an olive green army trunk between them.
That trunk looked so heavy, I wondered what could possibly be in it. Salvaged bricks? Gold doubloons?
When that trunk slipped between them, it tore a gaping hole in the daughter’s jacket, and a breath of feathers flew out. From the kitchen window it looked as if the daughter’s body were a mattress full of fluff, hacked up. I could see her husband pick them out of his eyes, knock them out of his hair, spit them into the wind like a dry, choking snow.
My father was sitting in his La-Z-Boy with an ankle up on his knee, shaking his plaid slipper. “They’re having some trouble over there,” my mother said to him. “Maybe you should offer to help.”
My mother had worried, after Mrs. Lefkowky’s house was emptied out, that it might be sold to someone of poor quality, someone who might put plastic garden ornaments in the yard, someone with sticky children. So I was eager to give her the good news about Phil and his mother. She’d just come from the dentist, of whom she’d spoken highly for years, and often, and she was smiling.
Apparently, Dr. Heine was an attentive dentist. He polished my mother’s teeth like miniature windows, gagging my mother pleasantly with his fat fingers, leaning over her in a silent and intimate embrace, mingling his minty breath with hers. When she opened her mouth wider, his white shoulder pressed into her neck. “Beautiful,” he said, fingering her gums. “You must take good care of these babies.”
My mother would swallow with her mouth open and try to smile, as if he were strangling her with her consent, with her blessing choking her to death. Then he’d hold a mirror up so she could see her teeth for herself, and she looked gorgeous in that mirror—flushed, lovely, dark hair subtly mussed, a bit disheveled. “See you in six months?” Dr. Heine would ask, and there was a throaty touch of longing in his voice.
Once, after an appointment with him, my mother seemed so satisfied at dinner, sang Dr. Heine’s praises so eloquently, that my father finally got up from the table and stomped up the stairs.
“Your father’s jealous of my dentist,” my mother said as if I hadn’t noticed.
“So who are the new neighbors?” she asked, slipping her coat down her arms, feeling the coat closet for a hanger. The living room was brightly static with TV light, and, in it, I might have looked blue faced, drowned to her. I was still chubby. My hair was straight and brown, cut in a bit of a page boy. My eyes were blue: good coloring, at least. When and if I melted off some of that fat, I’d have that good coloring, and those good bones, which I got directly from her.
“Phil Hillman, and his mother,” I said. “They’re moving into Mrs. Lefkowsky’s house. Phil is in my class. Phil Hillman.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“He told me today. He told me they bought the house next to ours.”
“How did he know where you lived?” I could see it puzzled and bothered her that a boy knew where I lived. For years, she’d thought of herself as an ocean, and me as a small boat in it.
I shrugged. I said, “He said he saw me in the yard.”
“Do you like him?” she asked, turning her back to me, hanging up the coat. “Not a thug or something?”
“He’s great,” I said. “I like him a lot.” I paused. I wanted to say this gently, knowing what I knew about her, about what I meant to her. “He asked me out. Next Saturday. We’re going to a dance.”
My mother turned toward me again, and her mouth swung open in a small hole of surprise, but she managed to turn it into a yawn. “Well, well,” she said casually, indifferently. “Well,” she said, as if she’d only half heard me, as if, after hours on a treadmill, she’d just stepped off.
My mother inhaled the little 0 with her yawn, then exhaled it over my shoulder, but her heart was beating hard. I could see that. I might as well have dragged her to the freezer by her hair, stuck her face right into it and made her breathe those rolling clouds of frost. In there, she might have seen her own face in a dentist’s hands—a blurred plate, the features she was so pleased with dissolving as she stared.