It took them both a minute to realize what had happened—and what hadn’t happened.
“Oh,” Sheila said, and tried to smile. “Would you look at us.”
“We fell asleep,” he said. “Accidentally.”
“Red wine does that to me,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said. He kissed her cheek, and didn’t tell her that, regardless of what hadn’t happened, this had: for the first time in his life, he woke up with someone beside him. This blew his mind, and his mind remained blown through the rest of the day and into the next morning, when, on waking, he realized that she had to meet his mother.
DAY
SIXTY-TWO
ONE
Skip Sorsby was late that morning, as he had been yesterday morning and the day before. What made it worse was that he didn’t even care. He came in whistling. As he’d told Bronfman many times, he ran on “Sorsby time,” and on Sorsby time he was never late for anything. “It’s all good,” he liked to say, as if it were the mangled mantra of an Eastern religion. “It’s all good.” As much as Bronfman disliked Sorsby, though, he would have to admit that there were times when he wanted to be him. Amoral, self-involved, oblivious of what others thought, and somehow universally attractive to women. If half of the stories Sorsby had told Bronfman were true, he could have sired a small army of little Sorsbys by now.
Bronfman waited until Sorsby was seated at his cubicle and had checked his status updates and texted someone.
“I was wondering if I could ask you something, Sorsby. A favor.”
“A favor,” Sorsby said through the wall. “Hmm. You could ask, definitely. No law against asking. I don’t know how much I’m interested in doing favors, though.”
“Okay. Well. So. I have a friend,” Bronfman said. “And she—”
“She? Good. Very good. Now I’m interested. Do go on.”
“She’s a writer, kind of. She writes directions.”
“Slow down. Back up. Directions?”
“Instructions. Like those little paper inserts in things that tell you how to put them together.”
“I didn’t know a real person did that.”
“Neither did I. But somebody has to.”
“And your lady friend does.”
“Yes,” he said.
Sorsby sighed. “And now suddenly I find myself not giving a shit, and I don’t know why.” Sorsby stood so Bronfman could see him hit the button on an invisible remote. “Fast-forward.”
“She wants to write instructions for IKEA. And I know you work with IKEA. I wondered if you knew someone, a contact, someone she could get in touch with and—”
“Oh, I get it,” Sorsby said. “You want to be her hero.”
Bronfman hadn’t thought about it in those terms, exactly, but Sorsby was right. That’s exactly what he wanted.
Sorsby eyed him knowingly. “Thereby making access to the vortex that much easier.”
“The vortex?”
“We are not so different, you and me,” Sorsby said. “Let me think about it.”
“Of course.”
Sorsby disappeared. A moment passed, maybe less.
“Okay!” he said, and stood. He shook his head. “I don’t really know why I would—doing stuff for people other than myself is against my nature—but I will. I will do what I can. I just feel so sorry for you, dude. That’s the truth. You seem so forlorn, like a hitchhiker no one will pick up. You bring me down, and I don’t even give a shit. So I want you to get a little sumpin sumpin. But you will owe me.”
“Of course,” Bronfman said, trying to hide his enormous joy. “By all means.”
“No, I’m serious,” Sorsby said. “If I do this for you, you’ll have to do something for me. Whatever it is I ask of you. I can call you day or night. That’s the way it works.”
“Really?” Bronfman said. “Day or night?”
Sorsby stared at Bronfman until he nodded, and Sorsby disappeared, and began clicking on his keys—beginning the inquiry, perhaps. Bronfman did nothing. He immersed himself in that future where he would be sitting with Sheila on her couch, or somewhere at dinner, or maybe going on one of their trademark walks, his status totally pre-hero, and he would say, “I have something to tell you.”
DAY
SIXTY-FIVE
ONE
He drove because that seemed the thing to do when you were taking a woman to meet your mother. Sheila brought flowers, lilacs she’d picked from a neighbor’s garden. Bronfman tried to imagine what it would be like to live in an apartment complex where your neighbors grew flowers instead of selling drugs. She held the flowers in her lap as he ground the stick shift into reverse.
“She’ll love them,” he said.
“Really?” She looked at Bronfman and then away. “I just keep thinking it’s too soon. That she’ll get the wrong idea.”
He idled, still in reverse. “What’s the wrong idea?” he said.
“I don’t know!” she said. “What’s the right one?”
“That we’ve dated,” he said. “That we’ve been on dates. That we’re dating.”
“I suppose that’s true,” she said.
“Suppose?”
She took his hand from the stick shift and held it. “No, it is true. It’s very true. I’m just nervous. I’ve never actually been taken to meet a mother before. I’ve met mothers, but never on purpose. She’s … erratic, you said. Anything could happen.”
He nodded. In the past few days he had thought of little else but this meeting. And it had been his idea. He didn’t know what would happen when he brought this new world home to meet his old one. His mother might bake them a cake or she might throw knives at them, or anything in between.
“It’s a chance we have to take,” he said. Because he had to bring a girl home with him once before it was too late. And it had to be this girl, Sheila.
“Then let’s do this,” she said. “Punch it, Chewy.”
“What?”
She shook her head and smiled. “It’s from a movie, Grandpa,” she said. “Maybe we’ll watch it together sometime.”
* * *
“Well,” Bronfman said, “we’re here.”
He slowed and stopped the car at the curb, turning the engine off as it huffed and rumbled and then, exhausted, died. Early June, 5:30 P.M. The windows as dark as they would have been had no one lived here, as if the older you got the less light you were rationed, and when you ran out of light that was it. Your life was over.
Sheila glanced up quickly, and then went back to rifling through her purse. “It’s lovely, Edsel,” she said. “It really is. I can’t find this lipstick I brought. There are so many pockets in this purse!”
There were. Bronfman counted them once. There were six pockets on the outside alone, and inside he knew there were at least that many more. Each of them harbored something, from mascara to her gym card, tissues, keys to an apartment where she used to live a few years ago, a pair of reading glasses and a collection of barrettes and hair ties, three one-dollar bills and some cents, gum, ginger lozenges, her phone, its charging cord, and enough pens and pencils for a class of sixth graders at a public school. This is the bag she was combing through for one small tube of lipstick.
“She won’t notice what lipstick you’re wearing,” he said. “Or she will. I don’t know.”
Sheila appeared to ignore him. Or maybe she didn’t ignore him but listened to him attentively and decided, because what he was saying was inane, not to respond.
“Eureka!”
She pulled down the visor and opened the tiny mirror and applied the coloring.
“Thank you for doing this,” he said.
“Nonsense. I just had the jitters. I’m at home with crazy people of all kinds, being one myself. I can handle her.”
Sheila was done with the lipstick. She regarded him, and he her, as two soldiers bravely joining forces in battle.
“What did you tell her I do?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I mean, she didn’t ask.”
“I don’t think there’s any reason to mention it.”
“What? Why? I think it’s interesting.”
“It’s not a thing, Edsel,” she said. “I mean, I want to talk to you about it sometime because it’s really … the thing is, anyone can say they’re a freelance anything.”
“Really?”
“Hypothetically,” she said. “It’s just not that important, that’s all I mean.”
“Okay,” he said. “If you say so.”
She took his hand and squeezed it, and then let it go, and they exited the car and made their way up the ancient slate walk, a walk his feet had trod an uncountable number of times. The walk was bordered by monkey grass on both sides.
Bronfman stopped before they came to the front door and took a few deep breaths. Sheila rubbed her cheek against his shoulder. A move like that, the cheek against the shoulder, to Bronfman, was more intimate than kissing someone’s ear. Do I love her? Bronfman asked himself this several times a day. He thought he might love her. But if he had to ask, did that mean he didn’t? What was the answer? Do you just know it when it happens? Could it be deduced? There were moments when he couldn’t imagine his life without her, and he thought this must be love, but stringing moments like this together over the course of a day or a week or a lifetime seemed to be asking for a lot. They had done everything they were supposed to do: dinner, movies, and walks—lots and lots of walks. They’d even gone to the zoo, where she turned her model on its head, comparing animals to people instead of the other way around. “That goose looks exactly like my grandmother.…” They had their walks, their pizza, their things, their private vocabulary. It was good. But he didn’t know what, taken together, it was supposed to mean. Pop music was his only source of information on the subject, and, according to many of the songs, he might very well be in love, or, at the very least, really close to it. Bottom line, he should be able to see it from here.
Bettina opened the door and stood there, like a sentry or a wooden Indian. Then she saw Sheila and let out a whoop.
“Who do we have here?!? As I live and breathe. Your mother and I have been taking bets on whether she’s real. And look here, real as can be.”
“You must be Bettina,” Sheila said.
“Smart, too.”
“Sheila McNabb.”
“Lovely lilacs. Mrs. Bronfman’s going to love those.” She stood there, nodding, smiling. “She’s not feeling particular good today,” Bettina said. “Still wants to see you, though.”
Bettina stepped aside and they entered. The smell hit him immediately. Old person. A damp smell, of something not quite spoiled—the forgotten apple, the abandoned peach. Musty and stale. Dust blankets. Darkness. He had never gotten used to it. He never wanted to.
Bettina led them to his mother’s bedroom. The door was closed. There was some sort of unit on the wall beside the door, which, on closer examination, Bronfman could see was an alarm system.
“What’s this?”
“What’s it look like,” Bettina said wearily, punching a code. “No one comes in without her knowing it. So when she leaves and comes back she can know no one is in there, waiting. She’s scared a lot these days.”
“What’s the code?”
“Can’t say. She doesn’t want anybody to know.”
“You know,” Bronfman said.
“Nobody else but me,” Bettina said.
“How did she pay for it?”
“I don’t think you canceled all of her cards.”
Bronfman glanced at Sheila, who had a smile engraved on her face. Soldiering on. How paranoid his mother had become, how protective and insulated from life. She didn’t trust life not to hurt her anymore, since it had already hurt her so much by making her old.
The door clicked open and the three of them walked in and through the shadowed space until they could see Muriel. He wished she could have met them in the living room. The powdery smell, the underwear drawer open and spilling over with flesh-colored underpants. As familiar as it was to him, he had never really gotten used to it.
The bedside-table lamp cast a half-light on the right side of his mother’s face, and left the other side gray, a spectral image. Even Bronfman, who had been watching his mother turn into this rice-paper scary-crazy woman, was hesitant to take another step. But not Sheila.
“Mrs. Bronfman!” she said, passing him on the left. “It’s so good to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.”
“Oh, Edsel?” Muriel said. “Is that you? I must have drifted off there.” Bronfman watched her mind come back, roused from sleep’s foggy drama. She focused on him, narrowed her eyes. Then she glanced at Sheila. “And you are?” Not knowing, but on the other hand not much surprised to see a stranger there. It must be hard for her to know what was supposed to be right or wrong, acceptable, not. Was this person always there? she was probably thinking. What do I know? What don’t I know?
To Bronfman: “You brought … a girl. Oh, honey, that’s wonderful. A real live girl.”
“Her name is Sheila,” he said. “Remember—”
“Of course I remember. Sheila,” she croaked, snapping to. “I’d shake your hand or embrace you, but I’ve … I’ve just started taking a blood thinner and I’m afraid if you accidentally cut me I might bleed out.”
Muriel laughed, her idea of a joke.
“Oh, I know,” Sheila said. “When you get old it’s all about medication. This one does one thing, this another. Take this one in the morning three times a week and this one in the evening twice a week, and the third might react negatively with the first. Yuck.”
“It clouds my mind,” Muriel said.
“That, too,” Sheila said. “My grandmother—who practically keeps her pharmacist in business—has to be reminded who I am, and then when she places me she’ll tell you how she basically raised me, and how when I went off to college I wrote her for a while but eventually stopped, and how much I love celery sticks filled with cream cheese, and how I should be married by now and … well, anyway, she’s a lot older than you, so.”
“So I have a lot to look forward to.”
“Oh! Not what I meant,” Sheila said. “But it’s true. We’re like leaves, aren’t we, desperately hanging on to a little branch, buffeted by the strong winds life blows our way until we wither and fall to the ground.”
“You’re a piece of work,” his mother said.
“I’m just pulling your leg. That was levity.”
“Sheila?” Bronfman said.
“Yes?”
“I’m not sure this is where we want to go with the conversation.” He cocked his head, puzzled, remembering something. “And your grandmother is alive?”
He thought she’d told him that her grandmother was dead, along with the rest of her grandparents; her parents, she had said, lived in a retirement community for visual artists in northern Minnesota. He felt momentarily off balance. But it passed.
Sheila glanced at him and winked.
“Bettina broke the remote,” Muriel said. “She breaks everything.” She pointed the remote toward the television like a weapon and pushed haphazardly at the buttons. “See? Nothing.”
She dropped the remote on the bed, and Bronfman picked it up, aimed. Nothing happened for him, either.
“Have you changed the batteries?”
“Have I changed the batteries?” Muriel laughed the way the Queen of England would laugh if you asked her if she’d changed the batteries. “Edsel, if you think I’m going to spend even a snippet of what’s left of my life changing batteries, then you don’t know your mother.”
He knew his mother. If she had a hundred years left in her life, she would never have changed the batteries. That was his job. Or Bettina’s job. Anybody’s job but hers. He tried to remove the back cover, but it wouldn’t budge. He tore a part of his thumbnail off trying, and winced. He brought the thumb to his mouth: there was a little blood there.
&n
bsp; “Are you okay?” Sheila asked.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“It’s bleeding,” Muriel said. “You should get it checked out. Don’t go to my doctor, though, because he’ll insist that you get the entire thumb removed. End of story.”
“I don’t think I need to see a doctor. A Band-Aid will probably take care of it.”
“Fragile Edsel,” Muriel said to Sheila, as if he were the one in bed surrounded by a flotilla of medicine bottles and liquid food.
“Seriously,” he said. “I’m fine.”
“No one is fine,” she said. “I’m older than you, so you have to trust me on this. No one is doing fine, Edsel. Some of us are just doing less poorly than others.”
“Someone is fine. Someone must be. Otherwise, how would we know when we’re not?”
“You don’t understand, and you’re giving me a migraine.” She closed her eyes and grimaced. “How is my son treating you, Sheila?”
“Perfectly,” Sheila said. Muriel opened her eyes. She seemed receptive to hearing about Bronfman’s perfections. “Such a gentleman.” This was true: he was. But even Bronfman knew this. He was a gentleman to the entire world. He would hold the door for a Nazi.
“Why so quiet, Edsel?” Muriel said.
“Oh,” he said. Was he supposed to say something? Bronfman couldn’t speak. He had never done this before. Introducing a woman to his mother was a strange thing. It felt as if he was saying, “Here is a younger version of you who will take care of me from now on, and thus your services are no longer needed. Feel free to expire.”