There was a radio on his nightstand. A Bible (Gideons—not his, everyone had one). A silver shoehorn on the table next to his chair. And someone had put a fat red rose in a Styrofoam cup on the windowsill.
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.
AT 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.
MARCH 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.
THIS 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 h
ad 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.
"WHAT 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.
CAN 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.
Even my firm body, those gym muscles—all the more ludicrous. I should have let myself grow soft, like my grandmother, I thought. I thought of her pillowy waist, pressing my face into it, feeling her warm flesh behind her apron—my grandmother, who had never seen the inside of a gym, let alone climbed onto an elliptical machine, and who, every morning, sat down at the kitchen table with a sweet roll and a cup of tea with heavy cream, relishing every bite and sip.
Instead, with my hard body, I've become like one of those brides in a horror film—lift the veil on what might appear to be a beautiful girl, and the face of an old hag is revealed.
This, I thought, lifting the veil in the middle of the night at the bathroom mirror, is who I have become.
Then, looking more closely, Where have I gone?
***
JON WOKE up this morning with a fire in his belly to "shoot the fucking squirrel" that woke us up in the middle of the night. Six o'clock he's out there patrolling the eaves troughs with his rifle. Chad said, coffee cup in his hands, looking out the kitchen window, "Has the old man finally lost it?"
I could see Jon's boot prints, how deep and dark they were in the snow, as if the Grim Reaper on a March morning were out there circling our house. But Jon himself was a blur in a hunter orange parka in the dull gray sunrise over the line of trees between our property and the neighbors'.
"What do you suppose the neighbors think about this?" Chad asked. He was up so early because he was going to drive Jon into work, then take his car to Kalamazoo to visit the girl he took to prom last year.
"I'm not worried about what they think," I told Chad.
The Henslins, whose property borders ours, are an elderly couple. They still slaughter their own sheep, milk their own cows, burn their own garbage in a ditch behind their barn so they don't have to pay twenty dollars a month to have it hauled away. Plenty of times I've seen Mr. Henslin out there himself with a rifle, hunting down the raccoons that got into his sheep feed, or his own aggravation of squirrels. And every October, he puts on his orange vest and hat and drives off with his grandsons and their spaniel, Kujo, return
ing with a dead deer strapped over the hood of their truck.
But, I suppose, those aren't the neighbors Chad's talking about.
In the last ten years, there are fewer and fewer neighbors like the Henslins. Instead, our neighbors, whom we've never met, zip by our house in their minivans and BMWs on their way to the freeway to work, and back from the freeway to their subdivisions. French Country Estates. Meadowlark Meadows. The subdivisions have all been built in the corn and soybean fields and razed apple orchards that used to belong to people like the Henslins. They feel like strangers, but are, I know, more like us than the Henslins. Jon and I did not, perhaps, raze the old farmhouse and build a McMansion, but our own motives weren't so different from those new residents of French Country Estates. We all had the same fantasies of wildflowers and meadowlarks, of a slower life in the country, and then ruined it with our desire for it.
Our own house was built by a great-great-uncle of the Henslins when he first came here from Prussia, and on some level I think the Henslins still think of our house as theirs. Twice, when we first moved in and the grass got too long for their taste, Mr. Henslin came over here with a riding mower when we weren't home and cut it for us. In August of our first summer, Mrs. Henslin called and told me I needed to pinch the heads off the hollyhocks or they wouldn't bloom the next year. Her great-aunt, she explained, had planted those hollyhocks from seeds that had been given to her by her great-great-grandmother, who'd brought them with her from Prussia.
I would never have thought of it, but I went out immediately and did as she'd said.
Those heads came off like damp, feminine handfuls of a remote past when I pinched them.
Once, I asked her about this great-aunt, but Mrs. Henslin could tell me, it seemed, nothing more than her name. Ettie Schmidt
Sometimes I tried to imagine this Ettie Schmidt in my house—a small pale woman passing through the halls, rocking a baby by the woodstove. But I could never really see her, never imagine any other wife or mother in this house but me. Beyond the hollyhocks, she'd left no trace of herself when she left.