“You look great, Mama,” I said, and it was almost true. She looked so good that I remember wondering whether, by the end of the month, I could throw out the grad student who’d sublet my apartment and get my old job back.
“Well, I didn’t know you were coming or I’d have something in the oven,” she said, touching her hair. “I don’t know how good any of these things people brought over will be. Like bringing coals to Newcastle, I thought, to bring us food. So we’ll have dinner out tonight at the Inn. Jeff drove Brian to school and your father has some meeting or other. So the two of us will have an early dinner, and then we’ll go to Duane’s and get some books. You’ll tell me what’s good and I’ll read instead of paint. I have to have something to read anyhow while I’m having the treatments. You know how the hospital is—two hours waiting for five minutes pricking the end of your finger for some blood. Or whatever they’re going to do to me now. How long can you stay?”
I looked at her, at her long-fingered hands with their nails kept short for the sake of her projects, and I realized that she did not know why I was there. It was how it had always been. My father made the decisions, and she learned about them later and lived with them. Improved on them, usually.
“I’m home for a while, Mama,” I said. “I’m back in my room upstairs for a while.”
“Home?” she said. “Here?”
I nodded.
“Oh, no, Ellen. What do you mean? What about your friends and your little apartment? What about your work?”
“I’ve taken some time off,” I said, but I could not keep my eyes from giving me away.
“Oh no,” she whispered. “No no no no no. Not to be a nursemaid to me, to take care of this house, to take care of my house. You’ll hate me.”
“That’s absurd,” I said.
“Oh God, Ellen,” she said, as though I had not spoken. “You have to go back. We can have dinner and then you can take the train in the morning. Or the last one tonight. There’s one tonight late, isn’t there?”
“Mama,” I said. “Mama, you’re going to need help. I can sit with you while you have the chemotherapy”—and when I saw her lips begin to work I added—“the treatments. I can take care of the house and do some of the things the doctor says you can’t do until you’re feeling better.”
“Oh Ellie,” she said sadly, “I’m not a fool. Don’t talk about it as though I have the flu. I said to Doctor Cohn, ‘Well, I can’t do this and I can’t do that, but can I at least commit to doing one of the Christmas trees around the green for the caroling evening?’ And she says, ‘Well, Kate, it’s a long way until December.’ And of course your father starts to hum that song about it being a long time from May to December. And Dr. Cohn shot him such a look. ‘Well, Doctor, I’ll make you a Christmas ornament,’ I said. ‘I’m Jewish, Kate,’ she said. ‘Well, then I’ll make you a menorah.’ And I will. Doing that does NOT include a ladder or a staple gun.”
My mother looked around the room and slowly came back to me. “I know why you’re here,” she said. “I know what’s going on.”
“I’m staying.”
“I see that,” she said. “Whose idea was this, your father’s?”
“Both of ours. All of ours. Mine. It’s just for a while, Mama.”
“This will never work,” she said. “He should have known it would never work. He knows you.”
She was only saying what I’d already said to Jules a hundred times. But I wanted her to think better of me than I’d thought of myself.
“That’s not fair,” I said. “I can help. I can do things here for you. I can do things with you. I come home and you’re not even happy.” I sounded petulant but I did not care.
My mother put out a hand lightly to touch mine. “Ellie, I’m always happy when you’re here. But I don’t want you out of pity.”
“It’s the right thing,” I said.
“For who?” she said, and when she saw my face she sighed. “This is hard for your father.”
“Him? What about you?” What I really wanted to say was: what about me?
“I’m fine,” she said. But her smile was bleak, without light or warmth. And for the first time I thought of what it must be like to know that you were going to die, that the trees would bud, flower, leaf, dry, die, and you would not be there to see any of it. It was like standing too close to the fire; my mind leapt back.
My mother’s face was calm but empty; I realized she looked like my Grandmother Nina, who never showed anything on her face, even, my mother said, when her only son was killed in Vietnam and the chaplain came to the door of their apartment on Broadway.
My mother liked to tell the story of how two men—“boys really, kids”—had come into the dry cleaners her parents owned one day and demanded the money from the register, and how her mother had spit Polish curses from between her clenched teeth, her face expressionless, while they reached across the counter and stuffed bills into the pockets of their jeans. I imagined that my mother’s face now was much as my grandmother’s had been then.
“Do you want some tea and a piece of cake?” my mother asked evenly, as she had asked so many times before. And without waiting for a reply she got up, tentatively, and went into the kitchen, and soon I heard the kettle whistling.
Well,” my mother said the next day as we sat at the oak table in the kitchen drinking tea, “what should we do?”
“Do?” I said.
For of course I thought we would not do anything much except drift, that she would feel sick, although she did not look or act sick at all, and I would be miserable, although I would hide it and deny it. That we would see one another, as we always had, across a divide.
But when I first arrived home she still behaved as though she was Kate Gulden in her own safe haven. And Kate Gulden had always had something to do, some project, some plan, dozens of them at once, so that it seemed a sin, if she was knitting, for her not to have a pot of something or other simmering on the stove.
“We need a project,” she said that morning. “Something the two of us can do together.”
Had there ever been such a thing? I was the one who ran in and out of the house; she was the one who stayed inside it. Somehow it made the peculiar intimacy of our situation so stark, that Kate and Ellen Gulden were finally together, alone, searching for something they could do in tandem.
“I guess I could use the staple gun and you could guide me,” I remember saying in a lukewarm fashion.
“No no no,” my mother said impatiently, and she bent her bright head down to the mug of tea, blowing into it, a wreath of steam around her face. “Something different.” She looked off for a moment, and then slowly she said, “A book group.”
Then and now, there was something about the tone of her voice that made me know that she had come up with the idea earlier and was pretending that it was new. “A book group?”
My mother laughed, an artificial trilling sound that had a certain impatience about it. “Ellie,” she said, using the diminutive that only she gave me, “are you going to repeat everything I say as though it’s the most startling thing you’ve ever heard?”
“No, I—I’m sorry. A book group. Fine. Who else should we have?”
“Oh, no one else, I don’t think, do you? The two of us will read books and talk about them. I’ve always wanted to belong to a book group, but there are only two of them in Langhorne, and I never really fit into either one. One is that group of younger women from the country club who read junk, and the other is the one the faculty wives have. They always seem to be reading books I’ve never heard of, by writers I’ve never heard of. I suppose they’re relevant.”
“Relevant?” I said.
“There you go again.”
So that became our project, what my mother named the Gulden Girls Book Group. We went down to Duane’s Book Store that afternoon, one of those September afternoons that feel like deepest August, warm and dank and slightly overcast, the trees clipping to meet the dusty sidewalks.
We bought two paperback copies of each of three books: Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, and Anna Karenina. And when we came home we arranged them carefully on the shelves in the den, both of us stepping back for a moment to see how they looked, as though they were a sort of still life.
Those books gave shape to our days, those first few months. They were distinct from the chemotherapy regimen, although we always took books with us when we went to the hospital to wait, and my mother often read while she was lying on the recliner as the chemicals dripped slowly, tiny raindrops into the tributaries of her body. And when I had spent sufficient time each day on the small everyday chores of laundry and vacuuming I found so tedious, she would call out to me: “Time to read.”
“What a great thing,” said Jules when we talked on the phone. “She trumped you at your own game. Not to mention the professor.”
“Jules, the thing you do that I hate is that you read a hundred times more into everything than it deserves. We bought books. We’re reading books. We’ll talk about books. So what? I never said she was stupid.”
“Thanks for sharing that, hon. I never thought she was. And what I meant was that she probably figured you’d be bored and she’d look at you being bored and it would remind her of why you were there. But instead she found something that will guarantee that you won’t be bored. Very smart. Very smart.”
I wish Jules had met my mother, but somehow I had never arranged for them to get to know one another. Both of them were smarter than I was about people. But they only spoke once on the phone when I was out grocery shopping. I remember afterward that I asked Jules what they’d talked about. “Tie-dyeing,” she said. To this day I am not sure whether she was kidding.
One afternoon my mother and I packed our books, took a picnic up to River View Park, and spread an old quilt on the grass on a rise from which you could see all of Langhorne. The Montgomery River ran below us, a sluggish strip of brown with ailanthus trees growing on its banks. Off to one side, behind a stand of pines, were the public tennis courts, always cracked, always crowded. Across the river was the campus of Langhorne College, concentric circles of construction—the stout Gothic of the thirties, the characterless hotel architecture of the fifties, the newly built science building a blinding wall of glass. At their center was the enormous red brick turreted mansion that had once belonged to Samuel Langhorne, where he had lived with a stout and rather jolly-looking wife whose portrait, black satin and pearls, hung over the mantel in the reception area of the administration building. Her name was Minnie, and they had no children, which, as a child, I had thought rather sad. But that was how the college came to exist, its motto being something in Latin that, in translation, meant “all our children.”
The classroom buildings hung over the river from a high and stony bluff. Behind them the campus fell away to the dormitories, a scattering of ugly little houses, and a rock quarry out of sight just beyond the back gates. Two footbridges and a one-lane bridge for cars linked it to town, and when the admissions office gave directions to prospective applicants and, more important, their parents, they always brought them that way instead of the direct route off the highway and past the quarry and a truck-storage depot. Langhorne was a fine but somewhat obscure small liberal arts college, a kind of poor relation of the Swarthmores and the Haverfords, and driving through Langhorne proper was more calculated to win hearts and minds.
Sitting cross-legged on the quilt, we ate chicken sandwiches and cucumber salad with red onion. Except for the hint of scalp beneath her sunlit hair and some lines that had appeared around her mouth, my mother looked fine. She took my arm when, as now, we had to walk over rougher ground, but she did it lightly, affectionately, to make it seem companionable rather than necessary. When we’d eaten blueberries I lay on the blanket rereading Pride and Prejudice and my mother worked on a needlepoint design of sunflowers on a blue background. Then she took out her book and I took a nap.
It was a beautiful day, the day of that picnic. The sun warmed our arms and legs, but there was a breeze, too, that ruffled the pages of my book. A tennis ball, bright against the tumbled browns and deep greens of the hillside, skittered by and bounced away over the edge of the outcropping, down toward the river below.
I woke as it went past, sweaty and cramped, curled on the quilt in the fading sun. I thought of the time Jon and I had gone skinny-dipping just below this spot one summer night, then made love beneath the low-hanging branches of some bush. There had been a full moon, and after I was finished but before he was, as he still moved above me, his half-breath half-grunt the only sound in the still night air—uh uh uh uh—I lay with my head turned sideways and saw stray balls all around, tennis balls, a Wiflfle ball with its plastic scored by plastic bats, even a golf ball from the driving range past the tennis courts.
There was nothing erotic about the memory. I had had twigs in my hair, and an old knotty root made a tear on my thigh, and when I mentioned the balls afterward Jon became sulky, accused me of being sexually remote. But I felt lonely remembering it. I looked out across the river to the college and wondered where my father was now, and knew that if I asked my mother she would know, would have memorized his class schedule as she did every semester.
But she was the one who brought him up and broke the silence. She was staring across the river, her eyes vacant. Then she said, “I remember this book. I was reading it when I met your father. I remember admiring it but being a little put off by it, too, because it does that cheap thing that people do, it makes the sister who is sweet and domestic and good a second fiddle to the one who is smart and outspoken. Jane and Elizabeth. I remember them now. It didn’t seem fair to me, that Jane was so good and yet Elizabeth is the one who is admired.”
“I suppose that’s Austen fighting back. She was that kind of woman and she knew that it was the sweet and good girl who was esteemed in society, not the one like Elizabeth who speaks out.”
“But Jane Austen should have known better than to make women into that kind of either-or thing—”
“Do you really think she does that?”
“Yes, I do. It happened in another book, too.” She looked out over the river again. “Little Women,” she said after a moment. “There was the sister who was the writer, and the one who had babies.”
“Jo and Meg,” I said.
“It’s all the same,” she said. “Women writers of all people should know better than to pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one. Women professors do it at the college, too, at faculty teas and things.” My mother pitched her voice low and looked from under her brows. “‘Oh, you keep house—how turrrribly innnnterresting.’” She laughed, but I did not.
“Perhaps Austen just meant them as prototypes,” I said.
“No, they’re real enough, both of them, Jane and Elizabeth. Jane admires Elizabeth, and Elizabeth admires herself.”
“Not true,” I said. “Elizabeth admires Jane plenty.”
“Really? Where? When you’re reading it this time pay attention to that, show me where, tell me if you still believe it when the book is done.”
“I thought you’d said you’d already read this book.”
As though I had not spoken she went on: “I remember how relieved I was to see that they all had names I could pronounce. I’d just finished reading some Russian novels and the names drove me crazy. There’d be these long names in War and Peace and I’d just skip over them. Does that surprise you?”
“I think most people do that.”
“I didn’t mean about the names. I meant that I read the Russian novelists.”
“No,” I said. It did.
“When I was your age, or a little earlier I suppose it was, because when I was your age I already had you, I used to go over to the library at Columbia when I wasn’t working at the dry-cleaning shop. I’d read for hours. My parents gave me off from ten to two most days and I went over there and studied. I think in the back of my mind I thought it would be a
substitute for not going to college. I found a reading list for freshman English once and I read all the books on it, although afterward your father said most of them were no good.”
“But you didn’t meet him in the library.”
“I met him at the cleaners. He had one sports jacket, a navy blue blazer, and he brought it in. It had a big spot of tomato sauce on it from the Italian restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue, and my mother made that clicking noise with her mouth she used to make when a customer brought in something really dirty. He told a funny story about taking a girl to that restaurant, the daughter of his thesis adviser I think it was, and having her father walk in the door and hitting his fork with his elbow and getting sauce all over them both. That episode killed the romance. Or I did.”
“Grandma and Grandpa must have been wonderful chaperones.”
“All your grandmother said when he brought the jacket in was ‘Ready Tuesday.’ But I kept reading in the library until he recognized me and then I kept reading in the library until he took me out to the Hungarian bakery for coffee and I kept reading in the library until he took me to the Italian restaurant. His hair was all black then, and he was thinner, but not much. He was very handsome.”
“Still is.”
“Yes.” My father’s regular features had lost flesh in some places, sagged in others, his rather thin mouth becoming more of a liability as the parentheses of middle age appeared around it. He was the male equivalent of that handsome woman about whom people say, “She must have been a beauty when she was younger.”
“And he was so smart,” my mother added. “The moment he opened his mouth you knew how smart he was.” She looked from the river to me and she smiled, a smile so full of remembered joy that it hurt my heart to see it. “I leaned across the restaurant table and said, ‘I would be the ideal faculty wife.’ And when I leaned back, all red in the face, or at least that’s what George said, hair red, face vermilion, he said, I leaned back and the entire front of my pink turtleneck was covered with tomato sauce.”