So I went down the fire escape first, trying to get used to the idea of my mom as a kind of double agent against Gran and me, and herself, for Pete’s sake, and not even knowing it! That made me really hate Brightner, for messing around with my mother’s mind so that she couldn’t even be trusted with knowing that Gran was all right.
How in the world was I going to keep all this from just bursting out of me, anyway?
On the bottom landing of the fire escape I had to heave the last ladder free and let it down to the sidewalk. It was almost rusted solidly to the frame of the landing, but as I jerked at it to free it, it gave suddenly and slid down with an echoing crash.
I stood there a minute at the head of the last ladder, steadying my wobbly knees. I mean, what if Brightner was waiting down there for us? But there was nowhere else to go, so down I went with my back to the alley, rust flaking off the iron rails under my hands.
As soon as I stepped off the bottom rung, a voice said, “Hold it right there, kid. Put your hands over your head and face the wall.”
Brightner’s cops!
When I looked up the ladder, Gran was gone. There was just a grubby handkerchief patterned like an Oriental carpet, tied to the rail and fluttering lightly in the breeze.
7
Mom in Love
THEY WERE NOT BRIGHTNER’S MEN after all. They were two ordinary cops who had been passing in their patrol car and heard the bottom ladder crash down.
I begged them to let me go and get “my Gran’s handkerchief,” and one of them shrugged and got it for me. Then they took me in, as they say, and frankly that suited me. That part of town is not someplace you want to stroll in by yourself on a weekend, when there’s hardly anybody around. So I ended up at a police station on the lower West Side, telling a story about wandering around in a state of gloom and confusion over the disappearance of my grandmother, looking for her. I said I’d noticed the handkerchief tied to the rail, a handkerchief (I said) that had looked like one of my Gran’s. So naturally I had pulled down the fire escape ladder to get to the bit of cloth, which I took out of my pocket and showed to the police.
And I held my breath, too, while they looked at it. Suppose they—or I, for that matter—accidentally triggered its magic and it turned itself back into a flying carpet on the spot?
It just lay limp, however, and I tucked it back safely into my pocket.
So that was my story—your basic lame, limping lie, and they probably didn’t believe me, but what the heck. The warehouse hadn’t been broken into, after all. In the end they called my mom and she came and got me.
The first thing I checked for was did she have a shadow. She did. Sigh of relief.
Now, this is my mom I’m talking about, New York’s most law-abiding citizen, who could not be expected to appreciate her only daughter getting picked up by the cops. She came breezing in, signed some papers, explained that I was a good kid but definitely under pressure about my grandmother, and yes, she would get me some counseling, and off we went in a taxi.
She hummed to herself the whole way home. The only thing she said was, “I hope this is the climax of whatever’s going on with you, Valli, not merely the beginning.”
And there wasn’t a thing I could tell her, not without her reporting it to Brightner the next time she saw him. So it was just as well that she didn’t ask me any questions. Weird, but just as well.
Weird because it made me feel as if I’d climbed into a cab with a nice but totally strange person. I mean, your mother is the one who always asks you questions.
When we got home, she sent me to take a bath while she made us something to eat. When you have a working mom, you tend to do all your socializing together over the dinner table. Which probably meant I’d get the questions with my food. I was not looking forward to this.
Though to tell the truth, Mom did not seem to be at all upset. You would think she picked me up at the police station a couple of times a week.
I came into the kitchen in my bathrobe and started setting the table one-handed.
Mom said, “What’s wrong with your hand?”
I showed her the cut the kite had made, not trying to explain it or anything.
“So that’s what they mean when they say a kid has been in a ‘scrape,’ ” she said. “Better go put some Mercurochrome on it.”
And that was that.
My blistered fingers were fine now, but the slice across the knuckles of my other hand had puffed up and turned red. Brightner had gotten me again, the monster! I would have put the silver glove on to see if that would make it better, but I was afraid Mom would try to take the glove away from me again if she saw it.
When I got back from the bathroom with a Band-Aid on my hand, Mom had put a record on the phonograph—“Vienna Waltzes,” one of her more sentimental favorites—and was humming to herself at the stove.
It looked as if there would not be any questions after all. “Heard anything about Gran?” I said, just to see what she would answer.
“No, darling, not a word, not yet.” For a minute she looked at me with terrible anxiety, and she was my own, good mom, the one who was being stolen away by this evil wizard. Then she turned back to the stove, singing along with Strauss like someone without a care in the world.
A new and dangerous idea popped into my head. She had to be looking forward to an evening out with somebody.
But she was wearing jeans, oxfords from L. L. Bean, and a plaid shirt with a wool vest over it. This was not how she usually dressed to go to a movie with an editor or an author. On the other hand, her eyes were made up to slay.
I began to get this squirmy feeling in my stomach.
I didn’t say anything at all while she stirred the pot and squeezed in some lemon juice and loosened up the ground Parmesan cheese that had caked up in the jar in the fridge. I sat down at the table like a limp noodle myself, feeling spacey and miserable.
“Presto, pasta!” Mom cried at last, dumping out the pot into the colander in the sink. Then, olive oil bottle in hand, she went all serious again.
“Valli,” she said. “I’m sorry. You’re worried about Gran, aren’t you?”
I had begun to wonder if she and I actually inhabited the same plane of existence anymore. With some relief, I nodded.
“So am I, darling,” she went on, “but a person can’t go around torturing herself all the time. It’s not healthy and it doesn’t help anything. So I’ve decreed a little diversion for myself.”
“What kind of a diversion?” I said.
Mom was lifting noodles out of the colander with a red plastic spoon that had square teeth around the edges, kind of like a claw. I looked away; I couldn’t watch.
“This may come as a shock, darling, but I’m going out. On a date.”
“Who with?” I said.
Bam, bam, bam, went my blood. Who else?
“Oh, you don’t know him,” she said lightly.
She was lying to me. Knowing I couldn’t stand the man, she was lying to avoid an argument. I’d done it myself often enough to recognize the symptoms.
“Where’s this guy taking you, dressed like that?” I said. “The Village?”
I could follow them, I was thinking, and protect her. Try to protect her, or something, but how? I kept wanting to cry, and wondering if Mom would notice if I did.
“He’s taking me ice-skating,” Mom said.
There was this awful disconnection from what was really going on. I mean, my mom is not a flake. She would not go out on a date with anybody while her own mother, my Gran, was missing! Only if the Master of The Claw, Brightner the Creep, had put a spell on her.
And Gran had charged me with keeping Mom away from him. How?
I said, “We haven’t gone ice-skating in years.”
Which was true. Mom took me a couple of times when I was younger, and then she lost interest.
“As a matter of fact,” she said, sitting down to eat with a sigh of satisfaction, “your father, may he freeze h
is little hairy earlobes off in Alaska or wherever the hell he is now, courted me on the ice of the Wollman Memorial Skating Rink in Central Park.”
“He did?” I was feeling really peculiar. There was no way that I could make my end of this conversation intelligent.
“Yes,” she said, helping herself to sauce and offering me the ladle. “If I am a little old to be the mother of a young teen, it’s because I was slow to marry, Valli, slow and careful. After all, I had the horrible example of your Gran and Malcolm to learn from.”
What a time for stories about Grampa Malcolm! Or rather the story about Grampa Malcolm, the baker.
Gran had been sent here from Scotland by her family to marry him, which she had done at a very young age. He had turned out to be the world’s laziest living human, and one fine day she had simply sent him packing. Eventually, after showing up occasionally at family gatherings for a few more years, he had retired to Florida and the family had lost track of him. Period.
I am going crazy, I thought, because I am too tired to stay sane. And my mother has chosen this time to tell me the story of her life because she is under a spell that won’t let her see anything real that’s around her right now.
“So,” Mom said nostalgically, “there I was in my late twenties, beginning to think about the virtues of being single all my life and teaching English, when along came Jonathan Covington Marsh, your esteemed (at the time, because love is blind) father. He was a rising young commercial artist in a very successful advertising art studio.
“He had no money, though—he was paying off debts left by his worthless drunk of a father, clearing the family name by interminably emptying his own pockets. ‘Draining the Marsh,’ we used to call it. But we had a wonderful time together on next to nothing. In those days, you could still do that in New York.”
She smiled. I squirmed. She poured some low-calorie dressing on the salad—another sure sign that she’s interested in somebody and therefore more than usually fierce about her diet.
“One way of spending a cheap evening together in the winter was to bundle up and go skating after work. You’d pay your fifty cents per person, check your street shoes, and put on your skates in the big main room.
“I remember how it smelled in there—of wet wool, mostly—and how friendly it all was. I don’t know how many times I had to borrow a skate hook from some stranger to pull my laces tight. Valli, you’re not eating.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said. I wasn’t. She put salad on my plate anyway, and I watched the dressing leak out and contaminate the noodles while Mom warbled on.
“They played corny tunes through loudspeakers. We’d totter out on the ice together, laughing and staggering, and plunge right into this big, happy wheel of people turning to the music.”
She sat back, dreamy-eyed. Her voice was low and sort of thrilling.
“Sounds cold,” I said.
“It was cold. It was wonderful. You got proud of being good enough to keep from running into people who fell down in front of you. One place on the ice was blocked off with sawhorses, where the serious skaters did their figure-skating practice and their lessons. Or was it traffic cones they used to mark off the magic circle?”
“More spaghetti?” I said. Maybe I could get her to eat so much that she’d be too stuffed to go skating.
“I’m fine,” she said, twirling some noodles absently on her fork and not bothering to put them in her mouth. “When we got hungry, we’d leave the ice and crowd into the pizza bar. I think it was fifteen cents a slice, and a dime for a Coke. Huh.”
She laughed so happily that I just couldn’t stand it anymore. My control snapped and I said, “Wollman Rink is closed. More leaks in the pipes under the ice, it said in the paper.”
Wollman had developed its first problem since they had renovated it. This was not big news anymore. But Mom looked as if I’d slapped her. “And that makes you happy, right? Damn it, Valli, why are you being such a bitch?”
Tears glittered in her eyes. I stared down at my heaped plate.
“So where is he going to take you skating?” I insisted. I had to know. Couldn’t she sense how desperate I was?
She said, “What is it, you can’t stand the idea of your rotten old mom ever having had a good time in her life, let alone possibly getting to have a good time again for a change?”
I’m losing, I thought. I said, “You always want to know where I am when I go out, even with just Barb or Megan, for Pete’s sake!”
“The situation is not exactly the same,” Mom said icily. She shoved her chair back from the table.
I got up and went to scrape the food off my plate into the garbage. It was making me feel queasy just to look at the stuff. “So when is—this guy coming to pick you up?”
“He isn’t,” she said “I’m meeting him.”
All I could say was, “Don’t go, Mom.”
“Hey,” she said, “I was born and raised in this town. I can take care of myself.”
“Don’t go.” I felt about two years old.
She groaned dramatically, got up, and came over to hug me. “Come on, Val, lighten up. Give your old mom a break. God knows she needs one.”
I grabbed at her hand, but there was this pain in my knuckles and I couldn’t close my fingers.
Mom didn’t seem to notice. She went waltzing off to the hall closet. “Leave the dishes, darling, if you’ve got too much homework.”
I heard her but I wasn’t listening. I was suddenly dizzy and light-headed, and everything seemed far away and slowed down.
The front door slammed.
I ran out after her. She wasn’t even waiting for the elevator, she was so eager.
I said, “Mom!”
Halfway down the top flight of stairs, she stopped and looked up at me.
She’d put on a dark blue ski jacket she’d bought once to go on a “ski weekend.” She’d told me later how the first time she got on a beginners’ slope and bent over to fumble around with the bindings of her rented boots, a single ski whizzed down from someplace above her at about forty miles an hour and shot past an inch from her nose. That was that: a broken leg was a reasonable risk to run, but not a runaway ski jammed through your head. She never went again.
The jacket looked great.
“If there’s any message about Gran, write it down for me, okay?” she said. “Remember, don’t stay up too late. ’Bye, Valli.”
She turned and ran down the stairs singing the “Blue Danube” waltz or maybe the one called “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” I always get those two mixed up. It hurt me a lot to see her look so happy and young, and to know she was heading for disaster.
My right hand felt on fire and twice its real size, and the stairs wavered in front of my eyes. I remember thinking, “I’m sorry, Gran,” over and over as I wobbled around in a little circle in the hall. I’d had my chance and I’d failed.
All I could do was to stumble back to the living room couch and fall down on it, where I either slept or passed out.
When I woke up, sunlight was pouring in the windows. My hand felt okay. The cut had scabbed over. My clothes weren’t even wrinkled, as if I hadn’t moved all night once I’d corked off.
The apartment felt empty: sunny, still, and void.
8
Me in Shock
FROM HER BEDROOM DOORWAY I could see that Mom was there, all right, curled up under the big red quilt with her hair sticking up in a cowlick where her head was jammed against one of the pillows.
So why did I still have this awful feeling?
“Mom?” I said.
She mumbled.
I went in and flopped down on the bed next to her. “Hey,” I said. “Are you still sleeping?”
She rolled over and blinked at me. My mom has spectacular eyes, the only really green eyes I’ve ever seen. “Umm,” she said vaguely.
“Listen, Mom. Did Gran call this morning?”
“ ’Course not,” she said. “Lost, your Gran. Prob’ly can’
t remember our phone number.”
Her eyes were tearing up. I changed the subject. “How was your date last night?”
Mom sighed and rolled away from me a little, staring up at the ceiling. “Mmm,” she said.
“Did you like the skating?”
“Skating.” She sighed. “Beautiful.”
She stretched, yawned, sat up in her nightgown, and reached for her robe, moving in a strange sort of lazy motion. She got up and wandered over to the full-length mirror on her closet door.
The cowlick stood up right over her ear. Normally she would have sworn at it and tried to brush it down right away. Today she just stood there, swaying a little, and gawping at the mirror.
She had her shadow, I could see that. What she didn’t have was her reflection.
Or rather, the reflection that I saw—though I bet nobody but Gran or me would have seen it—was of my mom in her jeans and ski jacket, on ice skates, turning in a slow, blind circle with closed eyes.
“Mom!” I screamed. I pulled her away from the mirror.
“What’s the matter?” she said in a blurred, irritable voice, pushing my hands away. She turned back toward the mirror. She sat down on the end of her bed and just stared at her crazy, fake reflection.
“Mom,” I said.
“Sshh,” she said, not even looking at me. “ ’M busy.”
I retreated to the kitchen, where I sat hunched up in a chair trying to keep from exploding in tears. Gran had given me this one thing to do, and I’d failed, failed, failed. So instead of my mom, my real mom, I had this—this weird, drippy, zombie-mom who came padding barefoot into the kitchen after me and stood looking aimlessly around.
“Sit down,” I said angrily. She was blinking at the window—at her godawful reflection in the windowpane, of course! I kept my back turned to the glass. “I’ll make you some coffee and stuff,” I said.
“Oh, no,” she said, “no coffee. Spiced tea, maybe. ’N some chicken curry.”
“What?” I said. “You hate Indian food!”