Ordinary Life: Stories

  Anna stood up and slid the chair under the table. “Well, I suppose you won’t be needing me after that, then.”

  My father reached out a hand toward her, then stopped it midair. Anna looked at me. She was willing me to leave the room, I knew. And because the larger victory was mine, I did. “I’m awfully sorry if this hurts you,” I heard my father saying.

  “Oh Anna, I’m sorry if this hurts you,” I mimicked on my way up the stairs. I thrust open the door to Helen’s room. She was painting her nails with a deep pink polish, and her hair was up in curlers. “Mama’s coming home,” I said. “Very soon,” I added, staring into her surprised face. Mary, who shared the room with her, jumped off her bed, where she’d been coloring, happily excited.

  “You can come with me, Mary,” I said. “We will make her a welcome home’ card.”

  “Two,” said Mary.

  “Three,” I said. “Three hundred and three.”

  My mother did make pies for Thanksgiving Day. But not three. She made five. “One for each of us,” she said. “This is a Thanksgiving much more special than any other. Five pies, for feeling five times more thankful than ever. We’ll make apple, cherry, pumpkin, mince, and … what? Blueberry? Yes, blueberry. A whole pie apiece. I’ll put our names on top of them.” She was flushed with her intentions, bustling around the kitchen with her apron on. She never used recipes, finding the notion of using the same amount of ingredients each time ridiculous. “The humidity in the air alone affects everything,” she said. “You have to cook with your senses. You pour in vanilla, smell, and see what you think.” She opened a drawer, then asked, “What are these measuring spoons doing here?”

  “They are Anna’s,” Helen told her, stiffly. “And she’s a very good cook.”

  “Well, I’m sure she is,” my mother said. “But Helen, you must know: there is cooking, and then there is …” She looked up, searched the ceiling for her meaning. Then she simply spread her arms, shrugged her shoulders, and said, “Real cooking.” She insisted that we all help. Helen, scowling a little, rolled out dough. “Love it as you do it,” my mother said, “or it will fall right apart.” I shook various spices into various bowls until the smell was right to both of us. Mary stirred relentlessly, her eyebrows nearly meeting in her concentration. My father was assigned to pour our mixes into the pie shells and crimp the second crusts, but he deferred to my mother.

  “Go ahead,” he said, from his vantage point at the kitchen table. “You know I can’t cook.”

  “Oh, Carl,” she said. “You can! But if you let the food know you’re afraid of it, it will turn on you.” She was being charming, and she looked wonderful. At one point, she sat on his lap and kissed him, leaving the residue of flour in the form of handprints on either side of his face. He seemed pleased, and colored nicely. I made up a hasty prayer, thanking God for his nick-of-time intervention.

  Before our efforts went into the oven, my mother made us stand before them. “Be serious, now,” she said. And then she addressed the straight line of beautiful raw pies. “We appreciate your sacrifice,” she said. “We thank you and the earth you came from. Amen.” Then she opened the door with a flourish.

  “Marion,” my father said.

  She turned toward him expectantly.

  “What about the turkey?”

  “Oh Carl!” she laughed. “How can you fit turkey in when you’ll have a whole pie?”

  This seemed a perfectly sensible answer to me, but I saw his face darken, and Helens too. But Mary, my mother, and I, we were dizzy with happiness. It was Thanksgiving; Mama was home, and the pies filled the house with smells so seductive you eventually leaned back, smiled, and thought about them alone, nothing else, no matter who you were. It was a matter of really being somewhere. It was a matter of paying attention, my mothers forte.

  About a week after my mother had been home, I woke up at night and heard her arguing with my father. “I said I’d make sure you took them!” he said.

  “Carl, I don’t need them,” she said. “They make me tired.”

  “You do need them. They made you better, and you need them to stay well. The doctor said it’s very important not to miss a dose.”

  “Well, I’ve missed three days’ worth,” she said. “Do I seem unwell to you?” Then, again, in a different kind of voice, she said, “Do I?” Then it was quiet, and I was content.

  At the end of another week, however, my mother did seem unwell. She would start sentences, then wave them away, unfinished. I came home from school one day to find her sitting alone and staring. It was frighteningly familiar. “Mama?” I asked. “Are you all right?”

  To my great relief, she turned to me and smiled. But it was a sad smile, and what she said was, “Oh, Lizzy. I just don’t know.” Within three days, she was back in the hospital again, worse, my father said, and Anna was back with us. We were instructed to remember how much she’d done for us. I remembered instead what she’d taken from us. I vowed not to speak to her. If the house caught on fire, I’d point. If she chose not to look, it was too bad.

  Because I would not hear otherwise, my father took me with him to see my mother again. She’d had what he called shock therapy, and she had a great deal of difficulty with her memory. “I made you something,” she said, “and I don’t know where it is.”

  “You’ll find it,” I said. And then, “What is it, anyway?”

  She pushed my hair back from my face. “Animals.”

  “Oh,” I said. I had no idea what she was talking about. And sometimes, if you pushed her for more information, she would cry in frustration. I prayed with my fists clenched, I made her many drawings, I visited her often; but she worsened.

  Anna had resumed her duties with a wounded air, but her affection for my father remained. Therefore she appeared grimly at our door each morning, and lingered hopefully each evening. He was kind, but seemed to have lost any romantic interest in her. Helen was just as happy to have our mother gone again, and Mary seemed to have accepted the concept of alternating mothers as a comfortable enough norm. “Mama’s totally crazy, you know,” Helen told me one night. “She always has been. And she just keeps getting worse and worse. Now she’s not ever going to be able to come home.”

  “That’s what you think,” I said.

  “That’s what I know. For God’s sake, Lizzy. Aren’t you ever embarrassed about her?”

  This had not occurred to me. And now, I swallowed dryly and said, “No. You embarrass me.”

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “How do I embarrass you?”

  “Your lies,” I said, and walked away.

  “What are you even talking about?” she shouted. “You’re just like her! You don’t even make sense!”

  I closed my door quietly. I wanted to think about why I would ever be embarrassed about my mother, whom I trusted above everyone, who revealed things magical and satisfying, who held me close to her and sang songs I’d never heard while I breathed in her plain and lovely flesh smell.

  One day, on the way to the hospital, my father said, “Well, they said they were going to try something new this morning.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s called insulin shock.”

  This sounded worse than ever. “Why?” I asked.

  “Because,” he said, “when something doesn’t work, you’ve got to try something else.”

  “Oh.” I looked out the window. I wished the hospital were closer. It was a long drive, and I was tired of it. When we got there, my father was called over to the desk. I went on to my mother’s room, not seeing her in the dayroom. It was empty. I sat on a chair and looked around, waiting. I saw something lying on the windowsill and went to investigate. It was a giraffe, made from straw wrappers twisted together—a kind of three-dimensional drawing. Next to it was an elephant, with ruffled, expansive ears. My mother had often told me that these were her favorite animals. “Oftentimes when a giraffe falls, it can’t get back up again. Think of it, living a life where balance is so es
sential! And still, they look so graceful and carefree, nuzzling the tops of trees, looking down on us all.” Elephants she admired for their human-like traits. “They get very happy when they see each other. Even if it’s only been a little while, they carry on so—trumpeting and stomping all over the place. And here is something truly extraordinary about elephants: they seem to know they die. Oh, how unlucky they are, to be hunted for their ivory when their living minds are so wonderful. Tell me,” she’d said, “what sight is better than a baby elephant holding on to its mother’s tail?” “I don’t know,” I’d said. “I can’t think of anything.”

  “Not anything?” she’d teased.

  I knew what she meant. “Me holding on to you!” I’d said. “Right?”

  “No,” she’d said, suddenly serious. “Me holding on to you.” She’d reached down and hugged me tightly. “It’s me who holds on to you.”

  I heard a noise behind me and jumped. It was my father, who looked pale and nervous. “Lizzy, come here,” he said.

  “Look what Mama made,” I said. “These are the animals she was talking about.”

  “Lizzy,” he said, and his voice cracked, and I knew.

  I stood up straight and made my insides be quite still. “She’s dead,” I said. “Isn’t she?”

  He nodded miserably.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “The insulin,” he said. “She got too much. It happens sometimes. They called just after we left the house. Ah, Lizzy,” he said. “She was so beautiful. She used to be so beautiful.”

  I turned toward the animals. “I want these,” I said. “These are mine.” He nodded. I picked them up, and they fell out of alignment, lost their shapes. At first I was filled with remorse. How could I ever fix them? But then she came to me, and I remembered what I knew, and I wasn’t afraid. I knew what was gone, but I knew what would stay.

  White Dwarf

  If you were to ask Phyllis if her marriage was in trouble, she would answer this way: “Well, of course it is. Why do you think I spend so much time in the laundry room? Why do you think I sigh and sigh this way? Of course it is!” If you were to ask George, he would say, “Is it in trouble? Why, I don’t believe so. You’d have to ask Phyllis, I guess. What do you mean, exactly, ‘in trouble’?”

  There was no fighting. Their life worked: their children fought and laughed with each other, did well in school, confessed readily to small crimes they committed, and endured with equanimity the small punishments for same. They knew this: if you were sent to your room, pretty soon everyone would join you up there anyway, lie on your bed and chat about things, forgive you.

  George and Phyllis exchanged necessary news of the day, smiled at their children’s inadvertent charm, watched television together in bed at night. Occasionally they had sex, although the last time they tried George looked up from kissing Phyllis’s stomach to find her staring at the ceiling and silently weeping. “For God’s sake, what’s wrong with you?” he’d asked, rolling away from her. She had reached for a Kleenex to blow her nose, relieved, in a way. “I don’t know,” she said, and then, again, “I don’t know.” George bit at his lower lip. “Are you tired or something?” Phyllis sighed and nodded. George turned on channel seven to catch the weather.

  It was Phyllis’s idea to take a trip together. She felt guilty about crying while George tried to make love to her. She’d tried to tell her girlfriend about it. “It felt like, I don’t know … It felt like rape.” Her friend gave her the name of a good woman therapist who took Blue Cross. Phyllis wrote it down and then threw it away. She decided a trip would do it. Time alone, and they’d get to know each other again. It was written about in all the women’s magazines. You had to make your marriage a priority, spend a little time together. They would send the girls to George’s mother’s house. Then they would go to an inn by the ocean for three days. Something would happen there. Things would get better. “Why, George!” Phyllis would say, over wine by the fireplace. “George!” She would be glowing a little, look kind of pretty.

  George took the kids to his mother’s while Phyllis finished packing. She had kissed their foreheads, looked into their eyes seriously, promised to bring them something—clothes for the twelve-year-old, a stuffed animal for the eight-year-old. “Okay, okay!” they said, and pulled away. They were ready to stay up late, eat sweets for breakfast—they liked staying with Grandma.

  Phyllis lined the suitcases up by the front door. When George came back, she pointed to them. “All set,” she said. Her voice had lost some vitality—she was nervous. George nodded. She carried out the small one; he took the bigger two. He complained a little—“What’s in here?”—but it was rather flirtatious, and Phyllis thought, Already it’s better. Those magazines are absolutely right.

  They drove for a while, talked about how the kids would do. Then it seemed there was nothing to say. It felt like diving into a shallow pond, hitting your head on a bottom you thought was far away. Phyllis felt it was her responsibility to think of something to say, since the trip had been her idea. She wanted to be entertaining. She asked George, “Say you had no money, and you found someone’s wallet who was loaded. I mean, there were hundreds and hundreds of dollars in there—the thing was just bulging. Would you take out any money before you returned it?”

  “No.”

  The brevity of his response disappointed her. He didn’t understand what she was trying to do. “No, I mean … Well, suppose your mother was starving. Or dying. Or both.”

  He looked at her severely. “No, Phyllis. I wouldn’t take any money.” Then he returned his gaze to the road, shifted in his seat uncomfortably. I know where he wishes he was, she thought—not with me. Somewhere else. Work, or alone. She remembered the print she’d shown him recently that she’d wanted for the living room. He’d said nothing, stood far away from it, jangled change in his pocket. She’d said, “Well, I mean, I just liked those colors …,” and then stopped, humiliated. They hadn’t bought it.

  She turned to look out the window and considered the possibility that she was being oversensitive, unfair. Perhaps she should see someone, a therapist in some peaceful office. But she didn’t know how that could work. They would be, after all, only two human beings. She would sit in a chair with pain expanding inside her. She would try to talk about it, and cry. The therapist would hand her Kleenex. At the end, Phyllis would write out a check in the amount equivalent to a cartful of groceries. She doubted she’d feel better. She thought she’d end up saying she would like to stop coming. “I don’t see that you really figure anything out here,” she would say.

  She sighed, a small sound, and stared out the window at the landscape. There was nothing to see, really. George had taken the interstate, dismissing Phyllis’s suggestion to take the more scenic route. “That way is hours longer,” he’d said. “Let’s just get there.” She looked at his profile, saw, surprised, a certain softening around his chin. Midlife, she thought, and the word seemed foreign to her, made up, an object she could hold away from herself and look at.

  It bothered her how George could be so comfortable with their silence. They could say anything now! She wanted to know about him. She remembered her girlfriend telling about something she did with license plates: “Let the letters you see suggest a phrase to you,” she’d said. “You’d be surprised at what you come up with. You find out what’s really going on in your head. No kidding—just try it.” Phyllis looked at the plate on the car ahead of them. DTH, it said, and Phyllis thought, Don’t Think Hard. She saw LBU and thought, Left Best Unsaid. She smiled a little. She started to tell George to try it, but then didn’t. She waited for more plates. She saw MNL and thought, Maybe Now Leave. Then she thought, My God, I think she’s right. She saw ADI and MHI and thought, All Day Insane and Me Hurt Inside.

  “George,” she said.

  “Yeah.” His face was calm, open. He was being friendly.

  “Lisa told me this thing, about license plates. That if you look at them and make phrases out
of the letters you see, it will tell you what’s going on in your mind.”

  “I know what’s going on in my mind. I’m starving.”

  “No, I mean subconsciously. I just did it, and it’s true. Try it.”

  He looked at the MHI plate and said, “My Home Intact.” Neither of them said anything at first, and then Phyllis swallowed and said, “Uh-huh.”

  He said, again, “I’m starving,” and she said, “Then let’s find a place to eat. I could eat.”

  IJG passed on the back of a blue station wagon. I Just Groan, she thought. She saw MYY on a red Honda Civic and thought, My Yearning Yells. She laughed a little. George looked at her and said, “What?”

  She shook her head. It was nothing, her gesture said. An accident. PDT she saw. Please Don’t Tell.

  They pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant: a low, white building, red-and-white gingham curtains, hand-lettered signs, huge trucks parked at manly angles off to the side. Phyllis was pleased. She liked places like this, and they were hard to find anymore. “Maybe they’ll have meat loaf,” she told George. He reached for her hand, and she felt a rush of displeasure. She pulled away to rummage in her purse. “Want a mint?” she asked.

  He looked at her. “We’re going in to eat, Phyllis.”

  They sat at a corner table. Phyllis looked out the window. Cars were lined up, license plates all in a row. At the end was a battered pickup truck, MPL 709. My Poor Life, she thought. Many Problems Living. She looked at George reading the menu, studied his hands. His left thumbnail was deformed from a peach can falling on it when he was seven. She knew this about him. His hair was thinning in a small, cruel circle at the back of his head, and he ached about it. She knew that too. She heard the crunch of gravel as a car left the lot and looked at its plate. NKA 746. Never Know Another, she thought, and then thought, Won’t I? Something inside her crumpled, fell in on itself. I will see a therapist, she thought. Something is so wrong.