Authors: Laura Kasischke
Who?
Had one of the nurses or aides taken a particular shine to my father? Or the art therapist? Or some old lady from a local church, visiting the shut-ins?
It was the kind of rose you could buy at the grocery store for a couple dollars—mutant, huge, and blindingly red, the kind of flower nature alone could never grow. Science and commerce and nature together had made that rose. It was leaning dangerously over the edge of the cup it was in, seeming to grow more and more top-heavy, as if burdened with its hyped-up beauty, as I watched.
Its stem was too long, and there was no longer enough water in the cup to anchor it down, I realized.
I stood up and took a step toward it, but it was already too late.
The whole thing was toppled—by what? gravity? my gaze?—onto the floor as I stepped toward it, water splashing over Dad's slippers.
And the petals, which were older and looser than they'd appeared, scattered over the linoleum, looking like the remnants of something violent—a shredded valentine, a little red bird torn to pieces by hungry, older birds, a bloody fight between flowers. My father woke up blinking at it, but said nothing. I cleaned it up and put it in the trash before I walked Dad down to dinner.
(4:30. Who eats dinner at 4:30?)
And then I left.
A
T THE
airport:
A tall thin young man in a flannel shirt carrying a duffel bag:
Is that my boy?
It had been less than two months since I'd last seen him, but seeing him there at baggage claim, leather jacket draped over his shoulder, I had the stunned sick feeling that I'd sent a child to California and a stranger had returned without him.
"Ma," he said, stepping toward us. "Dad." I glanced at Jon, who didn't look stunned, not even surprised, just happy to see Chad.
He kissed my cheek. He smelled of airplane—upholstery, ether, other people's laundry. He tossed an arm around Jon's shoulder. He said, kidding, as if I couldn't hear, "So, what's wrong with Mom?"
"She's just happy to see you," Jon said. It was an old joke between them:
Mom cries when she's happy.
Sentimental birthday cards, graduations, baby pictures.
But I wasn't crying. I was staring. I felt unmoved. I felt that I was still waiting for my boy to get off the plane.
As we waited for the shuttle bus to take us back to Jon's car in the parking garage, I saw a woman waiting with a little boy.
Nine? Ten?
Buzz cut, crooked teeth, his pants were an inch or two too short. He was holding on to her sleeve, looking tired and worried, and I had such a stab of longing I almost couldn't stop myself from going over to them, leaning down, smelling that boy's head, burying my face in his neck, saying to his mother—
What?
What could I possibly say to his mother?
You have my son?
Or, the old advice I'd been given so many times,
They grow up so fast, appreciate these days...?
But how can you appreciate the days, going by, as they do,
so fast
? I'd loved him every second, and still, like a flock of wristwatches and stopwatches and alarm clocks in the wind, they flew right over me, those seconds, while I was packing a lunch, or idling outside his elementary school, or putting a bowl of macaroni and cheese on the table in front of him.
No. If I had spoken to that mother, I would have had nothing at all to say.
M
ARCH
has, indeed, come in like a lion.
A blizzard yesterday.
Jon went off to work in it—his white Explorer a big white space in an enormous white world—but I stayed home with Chad.
For an hour at the kitchen table we played poker. He beat me, as he always did, even as an eight-year-old. I've never learned how to bluff—the impassive way a good poker player looks at her own cards, the nonchalant way she'd toss a blue chip and a red chip on the pile, daring her opponents to bet it all. Jon and Chad always said they could practically read my cards in my eyes. As usual, by the end of the game, Chad had all the chips. "Let's play War," I said, tossing my cards into the center of the table. "That's the only game I ever win."
"No offense, Mom, but that's because it's a game of chance. You need to work on your fake-out skills, woman. You just aren't devious enough."
I baked a lemon custard pie while he did research on the Internet for a paper he's writing on the Second Amendment. Today he's less like a stranger than he was yesterday. More like a fairly new friend, but every once in a while I get a glimpse of the boy he used to be—leaning over my shoulder to get a look at the filling as I spooned it into the shell, exasperated at the computer for taking so long to boot up, looking out the front window at the blizzard as if considering his skates, his sled.
But, mostly, the little boy is gone.
It's as if he's died, but as if his death has been accompanied by no grief.
As if he died and I'd never been given any notice of his death.
As if, even I, myself, his mother, had been an accomplice to his death.
All those years feeding and rocking him, and the birthday parties—the cakes and the candles added one by one until the surface of the whole thing danced with flames—driving him to track meets, band practice, soccer, I was driving him all those years into adulthood. Oblivion. Into my own obsolescence.
Planned
obsolescence.
I was in my twenties before I ever heard that term. Another cashier at Community Books, trying to thread a new roll of receipt paper into the cash register, had said it, holding up the old roll, showing me how the last three feet of it were streaked with blue ink. "Planned obsolescence," he said. "They fix it so you have to change it before it's even used up."
For a few days after that I saw
planned obsolescence
everywhere. A conspiracy of it. Pens with cartridges only half full of ink. Bottles of ketchup designed so that the last third of the ketchup in them was impossible to shake out. I imagined everything planned so it wouldn't last, or so that the last gasps of it would be useless, would only serve to remind you that you needed to buy a new one—things ruined intentionally before they had been fully exhausted—and, then, I forgot all about planned obsolescence, it seemed, until today, seeing Chad's razor on the bathroom sink beside his father's.
But that's how it's supposed to be. Isn't that what I told Sue? The whole point of parenthood was guiding him to this, to the end of his need for parents. At the time, it had seemed to be about something else. It had seemed, to me, to be about
me.
About the warmth of his small body beside mine as I read stories to him. The pleasure of wrapping him in a towel after a bath. The feel of his soft baby face nuzzled against the side of my neck.
Well, it hadn't been.
What I'd been there for had to do with
him,
and because I'd done it, here he was, a man gathering all the poker chips across the table from me in the kitchen.
T
HIS
morning Chad said, "Mom, don't you go to work anymore?"
He'd come out of his room in blue boxer shorts and a T-shirt that said uc
BERKELEY
. In the gray hallway light I could see that his skin was perfect except for the red crease of a pillowcase seam down his cheek. His hair, flecked with blond, was still darker than it had been in the summer, or when he was a baby—all those golden ringlets. It had taken me forever to have the heart to cut that hair. Finally, Jon had said, "Sherry, we can't have people thinking he's a girl when he goes off to kindergarten," and he was right. Chad was always being taken for a girl, a very pretty girl in little boy's clothes. But the first time I cut it, myself, I swore, as I hovered over those curls with a pair of scissors in the kitchen, I thought I heard celestial music—Handel, Bach, Mozart—playing somewhere outside from a passing car.
"I mean, Mom, don't you have to go anywhere again today?"
I said, no, actually, I didn't, that I'd taken a few days off to spend with him. Sue was teaching my classes. I had the leave time. It wasn't a problem.
He said, "That's sweet, Ma, but I was sort of hoping to have a bit of time alone, too. You know, having a roommate at school. It was just so great to think of having a whole house to myself for a bit on this vacation."
"Sure," I said. "I understand. It couldn't hurt for me to go into the office. I always have catching up to do."
And it wouldn't hurt. It
was
understandable. And, still, I couldn't help myself from asking, "What will you do here without me?"
"Crappy TV," Chad said, smiling. "Solitaire."
So, I took a shower. Got dressed. Got behind the wheel of my car. I hadn't really thought I'd go into the office, but once I was in the car I could think of nowhere else to go.
"W
HAT
are you doing here?" Beth asked when I stepped in. "We thought you were staying home today."
Did she look surprised, or annoyed?
The office was quiet, as it always is midmorning, so why did I feel as if I'd interrupted something by being in it? It was as though I were a ghost, some presence still hanging around after even the grief for me was over, let alone the use, after everyone had gotten ready to get on with their lives.
This is the office when Tm not in it,
I thought.
But there I was.
"I just needed to catch up on some things," I said.
"Well, Sue already left to teach your class."
"I know," I said. "I'm not here to teach the class."
"Oh. Okay," Beth said, and turned back to her computer. I could see, on her screen, a row of cards, mostly aces, before she moved her chair to block my view.
I took the papers and envelopes from my mailbox to my office and opened the one that was on top:
Sherry (Cherie!), You must be wondering by now who is this sad sap so in love with you. But if I told you, would it make any difference? The way I feel about you is all that matters to me, and perhaps I should keep it to myself, but for some reason I need for you to know. I know you're a happily married woman, but I also know that I need you to be mine.
I was still standing.
I leaned against the wall of my office.
I need you to be mine.
What does it mean about me that I felt at that moment so overwhelmed with—what? Desire? Longing? Gratitude? Lust?
And how could I feel these things for someone I'd never seen? Why did I find myself (ridiculously: like a woman in a movie) holding this note (torn from a yellow legal pad again, this time a green ballpoint pen) to my heart and sighing?
This time, I decided, I would tell no one about the note.
I slipped it back into the campus envelope it had come in and put it in the back of the bottom drawer of my desk.
C
AN THIS
be a symptom of impending menopause? The dreaded hot flashes?
I woke up in the night drenched in sweat. Maybe it was the squirrel in the walls that woke me, but when I woke, I was soaking—chilled and burning at the same time—and had to get up and change my nightgown. I went to the bathroom, passing Chad's room, where he looked like a giant in a child's bed, sprawled on top of his bedspread, one arm bent, the other flung over his head—and looked at myself in the medicine chest mirror:
How could I have been so deluded?
Only yesterday, after the note in my mailbox, I'd passed myself in the women's room full-length mirror and thought I looked young enough, not that different than I'd ever looked. I thought I looked like the kind of woman a man might fall in love with from a distance, lie awake at night, thinking of her.
But here was a clear vision of myself in bright light, at night, my face in the medicine chest looking out at me.
An older woman. (An
old
woman?) Lines and gray hairs, despite all the time and money spent at the salon only two weeks ago, and a tired sagging around my mouth and jaw, as if my younger-face had begun to melt.
I leaned closer, despite the impulse to pull away. I thought of my mother, in the days before she died, asking me to bring her a mirror and a lipstick. After I'd brought it to her, she looked at herself, handed these things back to me, and rolled over on her side, spoke no more that day.
And, how old was she then? Forty-nine?
I'd thought, back then, being twenty-two myself, that my mother was old—not old enough to die, certainly, but old.
I'd thought, then, that life would sprawl out ahead of me in every direction.
That, by the time of the lump in the breast, even if I was only forty-nine, I would be ready.
Looking at myself in the bathroom mirror—its clean brilliance—I thought of her coffin. White. And my aunt Marilyn weeping and arranging the flowers around it so that the white ones were in front, the brighter colors in a ring around those.
At the center of all that white, in her gray dress, with that bad wig, my mother looked like something that had been accidentally spilled. Or like someone who had been shot and killed in the act of surrendering.
It had been spring.
Riding with my father in the backseat of the funeral parlor limousine, following the hearse from the church to the cemetery, I saw a woman in short shorts and a tight T-shirt walking down a sidewalk with her dog.
The dog was small and black, and the woman's legs looked polished, luminous in the sunlight.
Looking, now, at myself in the medicine chest mirror, I remembered that glimpse of that woman and her dog, and how it seemed like such a short time ago, but how even that sexy oblivious woman with her little black dog must have aged by now.
By now, she might be sixty.
She might be dead.
One moment she was an image glimpsed from a funeral parlor limousine on a spring day, filed away in a stranger's brain, and the next moment she was erased from her own beauty in this world forever.
And I—?
Looking at myself, plain and terrible in the mirror in the middle of the night, I thought,
I have built my house on sand.