American Estrangement Page 5

  She’s still a young woman, which is half the tragedy, and she had me too young, which is the other half of the tragedy, but she remains beautiful, even close to death, with her hair mostly blond and her face almost flawless. If a stranger were to walk past our table he might mistake us for an attractive couple on a date; her beauty is a vexing and unresolved public issue for me. Now I sit in fear that at any moment the plastic fork will snap off between her teeth.

  How she has maintained an appetite I have no idea. She’s always been a nibbler because her figure has always been paramount, long legs and a narrow waist—even during her years of celibacy—but in the wake of the dire and unexpected news her hunger has become voracious. Perhaps it was just lying in wait. Meanwhile, the brown rice and assorted greens on my cardboard plate have grown cold. No matter, I’ll eat later at the all-night diner near my house which serves whatever the opposite of brown rice and assorted greens is. My own sustenance is the least of my concerns at present. Everything is the least of my concerns at present. Everything except the ticking of the clock that has begun its final countdown. In contrast to the short time that remains for my mother stands the long time that remains for me. This long time includes everything that I must do during and after her short time. Dying is arduous and taxing. Only the dead rest in peace.

  I’d taken the afternoon off from work so that I could accompany my mother to her doctor’s appointment, which, given all available evidence, was supposed to be a mere formality. We had even laughed about it. “Test results, ha-ha.” Now all bets were off. “The next few months are going to be the most challenging,” the doctor had told us. He made it sound as if he were delivering moderately good news, as if there were less challenging months to come, and if we could only get through these “next few months” it would be smooth sailing after that. What he really meant was that at some point soon my mother would be dead and the challenge would be over. That was the silver lining. That was what my mother and I had to look forward to.

  Twenty years ago, we wouldn’t have been eating at a Whole Foods on Center Boulevard. Twenty years ago, commuters driving in from the suburbs gave the street a wide berth on their way downtown, even if it added fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes to their trip. They referred to this as “doing the loop,” and it turned into a joke, and then it turned into a song by a local rock band that became popular on the radio station. The only reason to come to Center Boulevard back then was if you were the type of person who needed to shop at Goodwill. My mother and I each happened to be that type of person.

  Six days in the city and we had no dishes. So we set out one morning, naïve and holding hands, and when we finally came around the corner, forty-five minutes later, we were greeted by a long and unlucky road, running all the way to the horizon, bounded on both sides by burned-out buildings and exhibiting no signs of life. There wasn’t even a parked car. The emptiness was overwhelming, and so was the silence—we could hear our own footsteps on the pavement. If my mother was nervous she didn’t show it; even her hand in mine remained perspiration-free. Way off in the distance was the big blue Goodwill sign beckoning us with its half a smiling face. “Ooh, there it is!” my mother said, as if we were in the culminating stages of a treasure hunt. Midway to our destination a man came darting out from between two buildings. He was shirtless, even though it was late fall, and he stood in our path staring at us, saying nothing, breathing hard. After a few moments of panting, he gave my mother a wink, a gesture I didn’t completely understand, and then he disappeared back where he’d come from. It happened so quickly that it was hard to know if it had happened at all. My mother said sympathetically, “Looks like that man could use a shirt from Goodwill,” but it felt as if she were talking about something we’d seen in a movie a long time ago.

  We ended up spending the entire afternoon browsing the dregs, before purchasing two pots and a chipped dining set for three that smelled of mothballs. There was no three, of course, but it was smart to be prepared for all eventualities. And since I’d been “such a good boy today,” my mother bought me, as a token of her appreciation, a football jersey of the local team. It had yellow stripes and blue stars and a stain on the sleeve. I was eight years old and didn’t know anything about football. “It fits you perfectly,” she said, and it did. On the back was a strange, unpronounceable name in large white letters. I had become someone named Kruszewski. I felt like a clown. “You’ll learn all about it soon enough,” she said. She was trying to be upbeat, and I didn’t want to disappoint her. She wanted to spin this move to a new city as just one in a series of adventures, when in fact it was a last-gasp attempt at finding our own goodwill.

  But she was right: the football jersey somehow made me an instant star among my classmates. Kruszewski happened to be the best player on the league’s worst team, and, merely by wearing the shirt, I was closely associated with him. I even managed to affect a tone of authority when discussing the previous week’s game, which I hadn’t seen and wouldn’t have understood if I had. All I had to do was let others narrate while I reenacted the highlights by falling on the floor and rolling around with general fervor.

  Eventually I learned the rules and became a fan, and for a while a rumor went around class, precipitated mostly by my mysterious arrival in the middle of the school year, that I might actually be Kruszewski’s son. I did nothing either to encourage or to dispel this rumor. It was tantalizing for everyone, including me, to think that I might actually be the child of a star. “I’m not saying yes,” I would say with world-weariness, “and I’m not saying no.” No, I was the son of an engineering professor who was bald and smoked a pipe, whose only foray into physical exertion was the summer of his sophomore year of college, when he washed dishes in the campus cafeteria. He confided in me once, wistfully, while extolling the virtues of manual labor, that he “had even begun to develop some muscles that summer.” I understood this to be mainly a cautionary tale, no doubt because those muscles had subsequently been lost, never to be rediscovered, and because, perhaps as compensation, he spent the greater part of my childhood holed up in his bachelor pad making love to a succession of engineering students, plying them with sweet nothings about their scientific genius. That was what he had plied my mother with until he got her pregnant. The party was over for him after that, or at least it was on hiatus for the next five years, until he could figure out a way to extricate himself from her. Her meaning my mother. After the cleaving, he made sure to send money. The money was in lieu of visiting me. “I’m sure you can appreciate how overwhelmed I am with committee work,” he scribbled on official letterhead, which my mother saved in a shoebox. The checks came frequently at first, then haphazardly, then hardly at all. “I’m sure you can appreciate the limitations of a professor’s salary.” My mother found a job at the neighborhood library, “a way station,” she called it, all the while dreaming of one day becoming an engineer and designing roller coasters. On the weekends, she’d clear off the kitchen table and unfurl dusty blueprints from her college days. They were all numbers and arrows, and I couldn’t see any suggestion of an actual roller coaster.

  “Where’s the fun?” I asked.

  “The fun is coming,” she said.

  ________

  Now Kruszewski is long retired and there’s a Whole Foods on Center Boulevard and my mother is dying. Across from the Whole Foods is Starbucks. Next to Starbucks is Penelope’s Boutique. Next to the boutique is another boutique, and so on, for the length of the boulevard, the sequence interrupted only by the Goodwill, the sole remaining evidence of the age when this boulevard was a wasteland inhabited by shirtless phantasms. The blue sign still beckons with its smiling half face that looks as if it had been drawn by a child with a crayon, but now it beckons the hip, who go there to discover cheap vintage clothes that a poor person would never dare wear. The Goodwill will outlast Whole Foods; I’m sure of it. It’ll outlast Starbucks, too. When the boulevard crumbles and reverts to its genuine self, Goodwill will be the last man s
tanding. That’s the cycle.

  My mother pauses long enough in eating her broccoli cake to take an extended drink of water from a plastic cup. Her head goes back and her throat contracts gracefully. “Mmm,” she says with appreciation, as if she’d just come in from a hot day in the fields. Perhaps when your days are numbered your senses become heightened and you begin to experience everything with newfound intensity. After all, how many more drinks of water are left for her? How many more meals at Whole Foods? The march toward finiteness has begun. She wipes her mouth with her napkin, leaving one lone crumb on her chin, and I want to say, politely, Mom, maybe you should, you know, wipe your face again, because she has always been mortified by even one piece of lint on her dress. When I was a child, she would screech and recoil anytime my finger approached the vicinity of my nose. But more pressing issues have usurped the lifelong primacy of good manners. Good manners, good graces, good looks have become things of the past. We’ve arrived at that realm where the physical body has decreed an entirely new set of rules of acceptability.

  “Do you want something else?” I ask. There’s a plaintive tone to my voice.

  She looks at me and smiles. She licks her red lips. I wonder if her lips are drying out, and if this is an indication of the disease working its way toward the surface. Her demeanor betrays nothing of the verdict we’re contending with. I feel traumatized, as if I’d just walked away from a plane crash, but her legs are crossed and her posture’s perfect. Her earrings catch the fluorescent light.

  “Yes,” she says, “there is something else I want.” Emphasis on “else,” emphasis on “want.” She leans toward me. She smells faintly of perfume. I can tell she’s thinking not in the narrow sense of wanting something else tonight, like broccoli cake, but in the terrifying existential sense of wanting something else from life. For most of my childhood there was always something more we wanted, something more we were just about to get, something that was going to turn our situation around once and for all. It was vague and indefinable, this thing, hovering nearby in the air. I had relied on my mother to get us that thing, but there was only so much she could do, and now we have only three months left to do it.

  But no, I’m wrong, she just wants more broccoli cake.

  That night, in order to pass some of our precious time, we play a game of Scrabble, sitting by the wood-burning fireplace that my mother restored at great expense after I finished college and moved out. It’s August and it’s hot and there’s no reason to start a fire, but it seems fitting somehow that we spend our last days together enjoying the warmth of a fireplace that sat vacant and defunct throughout my childhood. This portal into the world was the stuff of troubling dreams for me. How could we be so certain that someone or something wouldn’t descend into our home in the middle of the night?

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother had told me, misunderstanding my concern. “Santa Claus is a myth.”

  I can see myself looking back at this game of Scrabble years from now, looking back at myself looking back, Mom and me, sitting on the rug as the flames licked, the wood cracked, the heat emanated. It’s the type of memory one should make an effort to create if one has the opportunity. In a few short months I will be selling this house, including the fireplace, which, I suppose, has added some value to what is, at best, a modest two-bedroom, two-story home with some original fixtures in a mildly decent neighborhood. But now is not the time to think of things like real estate. Now is the time to think of moments. Our moments together in this house. The rug I sit on, the Samsung television I used to watch, the couch in the corner, all the familiar objects from the past—these I will sell on Craigslist.

  “Maybe I should start a fire,” I say, as if the thought had just flitted through my mind.

  And to my surprise my mother agrees, perhaps discerning that we have entered the territory of the profound. “Okay,” she says, “that sounds like a nice idea.”

  Nice idea, indeed. Except I can’t quite remember how to get a fire going. I can’t remember, because I never learned. I fumble with the logs and the lighter fluid and the bellows. The flame catches but does not hold. It dwindles to nothing. My mother has to come and help, and now the two of us are struggling side by side. “Like this,” she tells me with frustration, because she is, if nothing else, an impatient person in the face of what she deems foolishness. She could never tolerate grammatical errors on my homework or in my speech. She could not tolerate laziness or idiocy in me or in others. “You won’t believe what So-and-So did today!” she’d say, regaling me with stories of her incompetent coworkers. Maybe she sensed that her own incompetence was lurking somewhere beneath the surface.

  Then suddenly, out of an unforgiving slab of wood, a flame comes to life, soft and yellow, just barely hanging on. Even from this small flame I can feel a significant amount of heat radiating, and I have an inkling that this nice idea of mine is actually a ridiculous idea, and that in a few minutes the living room will be sweltering, suffocating its occupants.

  “How lovely,” my mother says.

  The Scrabble game is the same one we used when I was a child. It’s missing one of the f’s and the board is so worn that it has almost come apart. We’d played on rainy days. “Dog,” “cat,” that type of thing. She was always encouraging and pedagogic. “What a good verb,” she would say. She would assist me at the end of the game, that desperate, grueling time when one has only a few letters remaining, the majority of them vowels, and the board is already so crowded that there is no place to spell even the word “it.” There was a humiliating quality to that endgame, having to have her come lean over and help, her breath on my neck. “Show Mommy your letters.” I was a little boy being instructed in the immutable fact of my own helplessness. Here, then, was my first lesson. “Look!” she would say. “ ‘Rat’ —‘rate’!” It was a form of alchemy, this ability to dislodge hidden words. “Look: ‘at’—‘eat’!” She was too eager in her discoveries. Her eagerness compounded my powerlessness. When I looked down at the board to try to fend for myself, I could find nothing, anywhere. My mother’s delight in wordplay infuriated me, and on one occasion I slammed my fist into the middle of the board, upsetting two hours’ worth of spelling.

  Now it is my mother who, on her first three turns, is spelling things like “at” and “or,” saying tsk-tsk to herself, garnering three points per turn, shrugging as if it were all just the luck of the draw, as if the game only ever came down to whatever random letters you happened to choose. The letters are the letters, her tsk-tsk implies, and there is nothing more you or anyone else could have done differently. Her inability to spell is troubling, and I worry that it is in fact a result of the illness worming its way into her brain, overtaking the part of the mind that processes vocabulary. I have a desire to rush to her side and show her what she could have spelled for fourteen points. “Look, Mom, here: ‘mouse’!” This would be something I would look back on and see as our lives having come full circle. Or perhaps my mother just doesn’t care about spelling anymore. Why struggle, she has decided, why labor, why churn when there are only a few weeks to go? This competitiveness has always been so silly. Let’s just spell “be” and move on with it so we can sit here enjoying each other’s company in front of the fireplace.

  But I can’t move on. I have resolved to produce something brilliant with what I’ve been given: aamasjp. I will not be dissuaded from this cause. My unconscious, ever more astute than my conscious, is sending a faint signal not to give up, that a seven-letter word does indeed exist somewhere within the jumble. I am determined to uncover it. I am determined to impress my mother. She will be able to witness the fruits of her labor. She will kiss me on the face. She will gush with praise for her little boy now all grown up and a successful speller.

  Time passes. I am aware of the time passing. I am aware that the temperature in the living room is growing close to unbearable. I’ve rolled up my sleeves. I’ve taken off my socks. Droplets of sweat have broken out on my forehead and n
eck. How long does it take a log to fully burn? To put the fire out now, midway, would be to accept defeat, to invite bad luck. When I glance at my mother she appears, thankfully, to be indifferent both to the heat and to how long I’m taking. She peers at her letters with curiosity. Even in the heat she’s composed, her cheeks just slightly flushed.

  “Whose turn is it?” she wants to know. Her voice startles me. It’s been quiet for too long. Only the fire has been making noise. I’m worried that her question is rhetorical and that she is gently prodding me to spell my word, whatever it is—“map,” “amp,” “maps”—so that we can end this childish game.

  “It’s my turn,” I say. My voice is even more startling than my mother’s. I need water. I need air. But I can’t stop now. I’m close, I can feel that I’m close—my unconscious is telling me that the moment of truth is drawing near, and that to stand up and open a window would be to jeopardize the balance of forces in the room, and that to compromise with “map” would be to squander a final chance at everlasting glory, and, yes, suddenly there it is, yes, in a flash, staring up at me. My mind has unlocked the mystery, it has given rhythmic order to that paralyzing randomness that has been confronting me all evening: “pajamas.”

  “Here you go, Mom,” I say, as modestly as I can, as if this were a favor done for her sake, my hands shaking as I lay down the seven wonderful letters that will reap me no less than eighty points. But Mom has fallen asleep, her head bent, her blond hair falling down around her face.

  The next day I take a trip to Ellsworth Daybreak Vista, in the valley by the old skating rink, to inquire about reserving a room for my mother. Ellsworth Daybreak Vista could be your average, worn-out apartment building if it weren’t for the two ambulances parked outside with their lights flashing. It’s impossible to tell if they’re coming or going, these ambulances, or are simply stationed there to wait for the inevitable. This is why I’ve chosen to come here without my mother—there’s no reason to subject her to the grisly details of what lies in the future. Soon she will need everything: medicine at all hours, meals in bed, bathing, wiping, toenail-clipping. Any day now the minor things are going to become major things, and when everything falls apart it’s going to fall apart fast.