I fell in love with this particular bed because it was handmade. It was designed originally as a rope bed, and Ralph spent a day outfitting it with wooden slats because I had researched rope beds and didn’t want to sleep on anything I needed to tighten regularly with a special tool. The mattress I picked out is as high as a wedding cake. When I’m up there I am thirty-eight inches off the floor. I feel like the ruler of a small, rumpled country.
It is an exaggeration to say my nose grazes the ceiling.
Two of my dogs, Rosie and Carolina, jump up with ease, but my old beagle, Harry, can’t make it. He was able to manage the other bed, but he had to back up to the wall to get a running start. Now there is no space left for a running start. This bed takes up the whole room, so I heave him up every night. I hope never to need a heave up myself. So far I am troubled only by arthritis, and if it gets worse, I can always ask my son to make me some stairs. I imagine covering them with red velvet.
My whole perspective has changed. When I lie in bed I am at eye level with the top of my bureau. I can see the photograph of a horse chestnut tree and a white chair beneath it, almost hidden by leaves, where my father liked to sit. I can see, I think, the charger for my cell phone, lost these many months. I am closer to the ceiling fan, which came with the house, and resembles something trying to resemble something out of an old saloon. It doesn’t move the air around much, but makes a pleasant sound.
I love it up here.
The four of us sleep in a huddle. Harry dives under the covers toward my feet on the left, Rosie on the right, and Carolina on my (our) pillow. During the night, Harry gets out from under and arranges himself on top of the blanket; Rosie inches up to lay her head on my shoulder; and Carolina, who tends to start compact and neat, softens and unwinds, extended by morning to her full length. When I open my eyes, there is Rosie, her eyes already open, watching my face.
Sometimes I wonder if I might be missing something with only dogs for companionship, but then I think about mornings. First there would be the discovery that there is no milk for someone who takes it in his coffee. Then the likelihood of conversation. I want to listen to the mourning doves. I like to sit on the sofa with the dogs, stroking Carolina’s silky chest, and Rosie’s satin flank. Harry sits on my feet, standing guard. Suppose another person were here? What if he had opinions? What if he used the word “deconstruction” with a straight face? I remember asking Chuck to explain deconstruction to me again because I couldn’t keep it in my head. We were walking past Hunter High School on Madison, and he began to talk about all those French people and then he gave up.
“It’s just something to do,” he said.
What if some man wanted to tell me how many feet from a dwelling a cesspool needed to be? What if he wanted to talk about the pros and cons of raising the mortgage rate? What if he wanted to talk about his childhood? Or worse, mine! I can put up with Carolina’s barking because she’ll stop for a treat (and because I love her so much), but people are different. You can’t shut them up with the offer of a dog biscuit or a little piece of broccoli.
Lots of people in my somewhat leaky boat are on the lookout for a human companion. Not me. I have learned to love the inside of my own head. There isn’t much I’d rather say than think. Of course for more than thirty years I’ve had Chuck. We’ve known each other so long that we don’t have to talk, and when we do we don’t have to say anything. When he asks me if I’d like to take a trip around the world I can say yes knowing I’ll never have to go.
The Boy
The telephone rings. The last time I saw this person was 1955, when he was twelve and I was thirteen. He has called out of the blue, having just finished reading a book I wrote. He loves my writing and he has a nice voice. He reminds me that he had been so smitten and so shy back in seventh grade that all he could do to show his affection was ride past on his bicycle and throw candy bars at me. He is calling from his sister’s house, and when we hang up, his sister says, “Next time, let her talk.” And he calls me back to tell me that.
A week later he sends some old photographs: our combined seventh and eighth grades, our junior choir, his birthday party—a table full of kids whose names I’ve mostly forgotten. I am sitting to his left. “I was a boy and you were a woman,” he writes on a sticky note attached to the photo. We played spin the bottle at that party, and when we were supposed to kiss, I refused. “I don’t have to kiss you, I’m not going to marry you,” is what he remembers my saying, and he was crushed, having secretly hoped we would get married. I don’t remember any of this; it’s like being a character in someone else’s story. I stare at my thirteen-year-old face, but nothing is revealed. I am a stranger. I remember mostly anxiety, punctuated by bouts of self-righteousness. I decide not to tell him that in those days I was afraid I would murder my parents in their sleep with the barbecue fork. None of this seems important now. After spin the bottle we had a fight, and a day later he called to apologize. “I meant to say it was all my fault,” he tells me, “but what came out was ‘it was all my fart.’ I didn’t know what to do so I hung up.”
I call Chuck. He laughs. Then he changes the subject.
“You only experience puppy love once,” the boy (I can only think of him as a boy) tells me, trying to describe the sensation. “It’s like being tickled,” he decides. Do I remember Miss Lee’s dancing class? Vaguely. He does. He remembers I was a foot and a half taller than he was. He remembers looking up at me wanting to say, “You are beautiful,” but all that came out of his mouth was “You’re tall.” I look at his picture again. He is darling, he is innocent, but he is twelve and I am sixty-seven.
And then he sends me a mix tape, all rock ’n’ roll, and I play it in my car on the way to the city. With the volume as high as it goes, I am listening to the Chambers Brothers singing “In the Midnight Hour”; I have one arm out the window, banging the beat on the side of my car. “I’m gonna take you, girl, and hold you/and do all the things I told you” could be coming from the mouth of a twelve-year-old boy who has no idea what he’s talking about, but I do, and I’m doing eighty on the Palisades Parkway. I imagine myself in a ditch, car overturned, wheels spinning, and when the cops find me the only sign of life is coming from my CD player, “In the Midnight Hour,” still cranked. What was she thinking? I imagine them scratching their young heads, wondering.
I call Chuck. “I’ve heard quite enough about this,” he says, which surprises me, but I like that he sounds tired of it all, and not because it’s boring.
The boy wants to come for a visit. Is there a hotel nearby? I tell him I have two extra bedrooms, if he doesn’t mind the company of ill-behaved dogs. We make a plan. I call Chuck. I’m nervous. “He’s in love with a thirteen-year-old girl,” I wail, “and I’m sixty-seven. How can I lose fifty pounds in two weeks?”
“He’s going to fall in love with you,” Chuck says.
“Not a chance,” I say.
But what if after all these years since 1955 it turns out we have been making ourselves into two people made for each other? I’m a writer, I’m curious: I want to know how the story turns out, but without living through it. I don’t want to fall in love, but I want to see what happens if I do. I want the possibility of change, not change itself. I don’t want to be filled with love, or longing, or desire, those emotional states I once pursued, but now think of as distractions from life rather than as life itself. I hate this feeling, I love this feeling, and that’s why I’m painting.
These days I am painting apple trees, one after another—red apples, yellow apples, blue apples, silver. I have four paintings going at once, waiting for leaves and fruit to dry, and I am covered in paint up to my elbows. To see what progress I am making, I have to turn the painting over. This is tricky, especially if I am impatient and flip it while the paint is still wet enough to slide around, but it’s also how I have the lucky accidents, how I discover that merging colors makes something better th
an what I’d had in mind. I can only do this kind of work by myself. I need to work myself into, then out of a mess. I need paint dripping and papers drifting and sliding; I need to make notes, lose things, I need to stay up late and go to bed early. I need to run out of milk, coffee, cigarettes. I need to burn with my nice hard gem-like flame, the one that gives off no warmth. Just as I’m on the verge of calling the boy from 1955 to tell him not to come, he calls to cancel. He has a complicated life. We discuss a rain check, but I am crushed. I am crushed and relieved in equal measure. I call Chuck. “What’s that poem about the painted thing being better than the real?” I ask. I need backup for my new thesis that art beats life. Chuck refers me to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
In the way back of my backyard are three real apple trees. Two of them are upright; one, after a long period of rain followed by a windstorm, has fallen on its side, but the branches still make leaves and blossoms and apples, which the deer eat right away. The biggest tree is back in the wild grass. High in its upper branches are scores of red apples, fat and glossy. I stand near where the tall grasses are often flattened by what I assume to be a family of sleeping deer, and this morning, for a moment, I wish I had the nerve to wade through, climb the tree, pick the fruit, but the moment passes.
Twins
Within six months of each other, my daughters Catherine and Jennifer had twins. Jen is single. We charged the sperm for Jen on my Visa. “All sperm is donor sperm,” I told her. Instead of looking at IQs and College Board scores, Jen picked a nice-sounding man who loved dogs. It has worked out very well. Violet and Ralphie were born in August 2005.
Catherine is married to her childhood sweetheart, Tim Smith, Cork’s youngest son. In 2006, when her twins were born, Chuck drove us to Philadelphia, and we visited them in the NICU. Augustus and Frederick. “We’re raising dictators,” said Tim. They looked like tiny sea turtles.
What with Ralph and his three daughters, Sarah with four sons and a daughter, two sets of twins bumped me up from eight grandchildren to twelve. I tend to think of this as my own accomplishment.
Abby’s Book
On my computer is a file, “Abby’s Book.” I opened it the other day and read the first sentence: “I sit in a chair, one of those uncomfortable hospital chairs, the ones that have a sort of cushioned seat, and a back that stands straight up. I watch my mom in the hospital bed, scared that if I turn away from her, she will disappear.”
For a moment I wonder when I wrote this. What a great opening sentence. Then I read further and realize this is my granddaughter Abby’s writing. She was fourteen, I think, at the time. I am impressed.
The Realization
It is the end of a summer, the loveliest time of year. Years have passed since Catherine and Chuck’s affair. Catherine is visiting from Philadelphia with her family. They are going to stay for two weeks. But she leaves the milk out and the lights on. She doesn’t make her bed. She doesn’t wipe the counters clean enough. I am irritable. The second night, her little kids are up until eleven, and I go upstairs without saying good night, closing my bedroom door.
The next morning I start to say, as evenly as I can, that eleven is too late for the kids to be up in the living room. We are outside on the deck, she is picking up a few toys. “Couldn’t you take them upstairs a little earlier?” I suggest.
“Well, Mom,” she says quietly, “I think we’re going to go home.” I look at my daughter. She holds a truck in one hand, a bunny in the other. Her face is sad and angry. The kids are running around, laughing their heads off. I love them so much.
“But why?” I ask. My heart is breaking. What is happening? They have been here only two days.
“I don’t feel welcome here,” says my daughter. “I haven’t felt welcome for a long time.”
And suddenly I realize how upset I am, and that I have probably been angry for years. How could she have done this thing with Chuck? is a question I have never asked myself, or her. We need to talk, it is desperately important that we talk, but a friend is on her way to see me, and she has driven almost a hundred miles. I have to meet her, and I have to leave now.
“Promise me you won’t go until I come back,” I say, but one look and I know I’m not reaching her. “Promise me you’ll wait,” I say, “we need to talk,” and the whole time I am gone I am afraid I will come home to an empty house.
But three hours later we are in my car, sitting in the parking lot behind the hardware store. I don’t know how to begin, I don’t want to say this badly. I choose my words carefully. I don’t want this to be about blame.
I tell her that writing this thing, this whatever it is, is affecting me. I’ve realized I never let myself be angry with her, but that what happened had hurt me. I tell her it was like losing my daughter and my best friend. I tell her how hard it was, stuck in a mess I didn’t make and couldn’t fix. My voice shakes. She listens quietly, intently.
Even before she speaks I see how upset she is. She makes no excuses. Her regret is fresh, her remorse real. She tells me how sorry she is and I know it’s true. She says this is the first time she’s realized how hard this was for me too. Ten minutes later I don’t care if she leaves lights blazing all day and all night. I don’t care if she leaves the milk out, or even if she drinks out of the bottle itself. She is my daughter again, and I am her mother. We are balloons floating in the blue sky.
Yard Sale
Fall, and all my kids were visiting. A guy down the block was selling his dead mother’s stuff and I asked my kids to see if he had any old picture frames with glass, or windows, but they came back shaking their heads. Evidently it was sad over there. All morning people got out of their cars, looked around swiftly, and drove away.
I tried not to think of the detritus of a mother’s life laid out on card tables for sale, and no takers. I wondered what my kids would do with my collections of anything and everything. I hope they don’t feel guilty if nobody wants my barrel staves or my pieces of iron or the run-over windshield wiper, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
I think about death because death is inevitable, but what else is coming? My mind draws a blank. The words “plan for the future” actually make me laugh out loud. The future is a moving target, completely unpredictable. Like the past.
I didn’t know I never thought about it until I had coffee in the city with a woman who thought about it all the time. She worried that her future had shrunk. She worried about her health, although she looked fine to me. She lay awake at night with these worries.
“Don’t you?” she asked. I was staring at her beautiful shoes.
“No,” I answered, wondering if this was a failing. “I never think about the future at all.”
“I worry about what would happen if John got sick or I got sick, I worry how we would manage.”
I don’t worry about my husband, the worst that could happen to him already happened. He was hit by a car in April of 2000, and sustained permanent brain damage. Seven years later, January 1, 2007, he died. Grief is different from worry. I don’t want to remember what it was like before, eating muffins and reading the paper together on the porch. I don’t want to remember him planting the wild grasses that he loved, or the way he smiled at me, or his generous heart. I don’t want to remember walking down Broadway holding hands. I am still shocked by what happened. I am used to never getting used to it. But grief overtakes me in the coffee aisle, or sweeping the porch, or smiling at the dogs, catching me unaware. Grief is not a pleasure, but it makes me remember, and I am grateful.
The worried woman was only a few years older than I am. Maybe seventy-five brings with it the gravitas I lack. When we parted, I allowed myself to feel sorry for her, a woman wasting a perfectly good afternoon worrying about something that might never happen. Well, the death part will happen, I reminded myself, but before this line of thought could go any further I was distracted by a figure clad entirely in gold walking t
oward me on Fifty-Ninth Street. I took it all in, the gold hat with a golden feather, gold jacket and pants, gold boots, golden gloves, a gold lorgnette, and a golden mask that covered his or her entire face. Oh, New York, was all I was thinking, I love you so much.
Junkies
Ralph and his girls—Quinn, Justine, and Renny—went to another yard sale and brought me back a painting. The background is a bunch of blue buildings, the foreground is a man (or possibly a woman) screaming. “Nana will love this,” Justine had said, excited. I love that she knows me so well.
We are all junkies. We stop when there is what we like to call “good garbage” by the side of the road, or sticking out of Dumpsters. Ralph used to come back with more taken from the dump than he had deposited. I pick up bits of iron that look interesting, Catherine stops for run-over reptiles and adds the bones to her collection, Jennifer drags furniture into her car, and Sarah does a lot of eBay. Well, we have all done a lot of eBay.
Somehow it is more interesting to find something beat-up and handled than to get it new. My bureau drawers are stuffed with god knows what, and my daughters always go through them when they are here. It is a compulsion. My theory is that they are looking for the secret, the answer, the explanation for everything.
The Children’s Zoo
Chuck and I ate lunch together almost every day. This was probably twenty-five years ago, but I remember it clearly. Something about the city skyline made me melancholy. Central Park South always depressed me—too many awnings, all those fancy doormen, all those tourists. Chuck ate barbecue potato chips and drank Coke; I ate a cheese sandwich. There were bald spots in the grass. A pretty young woman nearby was reading a big book, we wanted to know what it was. “Principles of Accounting,” Chuck said, after a good squint. Hmm. Not what we’d thought.