For One More Day (12 page)

On the bed, the little girl played with Miss Thelma's hair. Miss Thelma grinned and glanced over at us.

"Do you remember the old lady Golinski?" my mother said.

I remembered. A patient at the hospital. Terminal illness. She was dying. But she used to tell my mother every day about people who

'Visited" her. People from her past with whom she spoke and laughed.

My mother recounted this at the dinner table, how she'd peek in the room and see the old lady Golinski with her eyes closed, smiling and mumbling in some invisible conversation. My father called her "crazy. "

She died a week later.

"She wasn't crazy," my mother said now. "Then Miss Thelma is ... "

"Close. " My mother's eyes narrowed. "It's easier to talk to the dead the closer you get. "

I felt a cold flush from my shoulders to my feet. "Does that mean I'm

... " I meant to say "dying. " I meant to say "gone. "

"You're my son, " she whispered. "That's what you are. " I swallowed.

"How much time do I have?"

"Some, " she said. “Not a lot? " "What's a lot? "

"I don't know, Mom. Will I be with you forever, or will you be gone in a minute? "

"You can find something truly important in a minute," she said.

Suddenly, all the glass in Miss Thelma's house exploded, windows, mirrors, TV screens. The shattering pieces flew around us as if we stood in the vortex of a hurricane. A voice from outside thundered over it all.

" CHARLES BENETTO ! I KNO W YOU CAN HEAR ME ! ANS WER ME! "

"What do I do? " I screamed to my mother.

She blinked calmly as the glass swirled around her. "That's up to you, Charley," she said.

IV. Night

The Sunlight Fades

ONCE HEAVEN IS DONE WITH GRANDMA, WE'D LIKE HER BACK, THANKS." My daughter had written that in the guest book at my mother's funeral, the kind of assumptive yet incongruent thing a teenager comes up with. But seeing my mother again, hearing her explain how this "dead" world worked, how she was called back to people by their memories of her–well, maybe Maria was onto something.

The glass storm of Miss Thelma's house had passed; I'd had to squeeze my eyes shut to make it stop. Shards of glass poked in my skin and I tried to brush them free, but even that seemed to require great effort.

I was weakening, withering. This day with my mother was losing its light.

"Am I going to die? " I asked.

"I don't know, Charley. Only God knows that. " "Is this heaven? "

"This is Pepperville Beach. Don't you remember? " "If I'm dead ... If I die ... do I get to be with you? " She grinned. "Oh, so now you want to be with me. "

Maybe that sounds cold to you. But my mother was just being my mother, a little funny, a little teasing the way she'd be had we spent this day together before she'd died.

She was also justified. So many times, I had chosen not to be with her. Too busy. Too tired. Don't feel like dealing with it. Church? No thanks. Dinner? Sorry. Come down to visit? Can't do it, maybe next week.

You count the hours you could have spent with your mother. It's a lifetime in itself.

SHE TOOK MY hand now. After Miss Thelma's, we simply walked forward and the scenery changed and we eased through a series of brief appearances in people's lives. Some I recognized as my mother's old friends. Some were men I barely knew, men who had once admired her: a butcher named Armando, a tax

attorney named Howard, a flat-nosed watch repairman named Gerhard. My mother spent only a moment with each, smiling or sitting in front of them.

" So they're thinking about you now? " I said. "Mmm, " she said, nodding.

"You go everywhere you're thought of?" "No," she said. "Not everywhere."

We appeared near a man gazing out a window. Then another man in a hospital bed.

"So many," I said.

"They were just men, Charley. Decent men. Some were widowers."

"Did you go out with them?"

“No.”

"Did they ask?" "Many times."

"Why are you seeing them now?"

"Oh, a woman's prerogative, I guess." She placed her hands together and touched her nose, hiding a small smile. "It's still nice to be thought about, you know."

I studied her face. There was no doubting her beauty, even in her late seventies, when she had taken on a more wrinkled elegance, her eyes behind glasses, her hair–once the blue-black of midnight–now the silver of a cloudy afternoon sky. These men had seen her as a woman.

But I had never seen her that way. I had never known her as Pauline, the name her parents had given her, or as Posey, the name her friends had given her; only as Mom, the name I had given her. I could only see her carrying dinner to the table with kitchen mitts, or carpooling us to the bowling alley.

"Why didn't you marry again?" I asked. "Charley." She narrowed her eyes. "Come on."

"No. I'm serious. After we grew up–weren't you lonely? "

She looked away. "Sometimes. But then you and Roberta had kids, and that gave me grandkids, and I had the ladies here and–oh, you know, Charley. The years pass. "

I watched her turn her palms up and smile. I had forgotten the small joy of listening to my mother talk about herself.

"Life goes quickly, doesn't it, Charley?"

"Yeah," I mumbled.

"It's such a shame to waste time. We always think we have so much of it."

I thought about the days I had handed over to a bottle. The nights I couldn't remember. The mornings I slept through. All that time spent running from myself.

"Do you remember–" She started laughing. "When I dressed you as a mummy for Halloween? And it rained?"

I looked down. "You ruined my life. "

Even then, I thought, blaming someone else.

"YOU SHOULD EAT some supper," she said.

And with that, we were back in her kitchen, at the round table, one last time. There was fried chicken and yellow rice and roasted eggplant, all hot, all familiar, dishes she'd cooked for my sister and me a hundred times. But unlike the stunned sensation I'd felt earlier in this room, now I was agitated, unnerved, as ifI knew something bad was coming. She glanced at me, concerned, and I tried to deflect her attention.

"Tell me about your family," I said. "Charley," she said. "I've told you that stuff." My head was pounding.

"Tell me again."

And so she did. She told me about her parents, both immigrants, who died before I was born. She told me about her two uncles and her crazy aunt who refused to learn English and still believed in family curses. She told me about her cousins, Joe and Eddie, who lived on the other coast. There was usually one small anecdote that identified each person. ("She was deathly afraid of dogs." "He tried to join the Navy when he was fifteen.") And it seemed critical now that I match the name with the detail. Roberta and I used to roll our eyes when she launched into these stories. But years later, after the funeral, Maria had asked me questions about the family who was related to whom–and I struggled. I couldn't remember. A big chunk of our history had been buried with my mother. You should never let your past disappear that way.

So this time, I listened intently as my mother went through each branch of the tree, bending back a finger for every person she recounted. Finally, when she finished, she pushed her hands together, and the fingers–like the characters intertwined.

"Annnyhow," she half sang. "That was–" "I missed you, Mom. "

The words just spilled out of me. She smiled, but she didn't answer.

She seemed to consider the sentence, gathering my intent, as if pulling in a fisherman's net.

Then, with the sun setting into whatever horizon of whatever world we were in, she ticked her tongue and said, "We have one more stop to make, Charley."

The Day He Wanted Back

I NEED TO TELL YOU NOW about the last time I saw my mother alive, and the thing that I did.

It was eight years earlier, at her seventy-ninth birthday party. She had joked that people had better come, because starting next year "I'm not going to tell anyone it's my birthday ever again. " Of course she said this at sixty-nine and fifty-nine and maybe even twenty-nine.

The party was a lunch at her house on a Saturday afternoon. In attendance were my wife and daughter; my sister, Roberta, and her husband, Elliot; their three kids (the youngest of which, five-year-old Roxanne, now wore ballerina slippers wherever she went); plus a good two dozen people from the old neighborhood, including the elderly women whose hair my mother washed and set. Many of these women were in poor health; one came in a wheelchair. Still, they had all been recently coiffed, their hair sprayed like helmets, and I wondered if my mother hadn't organized the party just so the ladies had a reason to primp.

"I want Grandma to do my makeup, OK?” Maria said, bounding up to me, her fourteen-year-old body still coltish and awkward.

"Why?" I said.

" 'Cause I want her to. She said if it was OK with you, she would. "

I looked at Catherine. She shrugged. Maria rabbit punched me in the arm. "Please-please-please-please-please?"

I have spoken enough about how bleak my life felt after baseball. I should mention that Maria was the exception to all that. I found my greatest joy in her. I tried to be a decent father. I tried to pay attention to the little things. I wiped the ketchup off her face after French fries. I sat beside her at her small desk, pencil in hand, helping her do math problems. I sent her back upstairs when, as an eleven-year-old, she came down wearing a halter top. And I was always quick to throw her a ball or take her to the local YMCA for swimming lessons, happy to keep her a tomboy as long as possible.

I would later learn, after I fell out of her life, that she wrote about sports for her college newspaper. And in that mixing of words and athletics, I realized how your mother and father pass through you to your children, like it or not.

THE PARTY continued, plates clanked and music played. The room hummed with chatter. My mother read her cards out loud as if they were congratulatory telegrams from foreign dignitaries, even the cheap, pastel-colored ones with rabbits on the front ("Just thought I'd hop in to say…Hope your birthday is a real thumperl"). When she finished she would turn the card open so everyone could see, and she'd blow a kiss to the sender: "Mmmwah!"

Sometime after the cards, but before the cake and gifts, the phone rang. The phone could ring a long time in my mother's house because she wouldn't rush what she was doing to answer; she would finish vacuuming the last corner or spraying the last window, as if it didn't count until you picked it up. Since nobody was getting it, I did.

If I had my life to do over again, I would have let it ring.

"HELLO?" I YELLED over the din.

My mother still used a Princess phone. The cord was twenty feet long because she liked to walk around as she talked.

"Hello? " I said again. I pressed the receiver closer to my ear.

"Hel-looo? "

I was about to hang up when I heard a man clear his throat. Then my father said, "Chick? That you? "

AT FIRST I didn't answer. I was stunned. Although my mother's phone number had never changed, it was hard to believe my father was calling it. His departure from this house had been so sudden and destructive hearing his voice seemed like a man walking back into a burning building.

"Yeah, it's me, " I whispered.

"I've been trying to find you. I called your house and your office. I took a chance you might be–-"

"It's Mom's birthday."

"Oh, right," he said.

"Did you want to speak to her?"

I had rushed into that sentence. I could feel my father rolling his eyes.

"Chick, I was talking with Pete Garner."

"Pete Garner–" "From the Pirates"

“Yeah?"

I walked the phone away from the guests. As I cupped the receiver with my free hand, I glanced at two old women sitting on the couch, eating tuna salad from paper plates.

"They got their Old Timers game, right? " my father said. "And Pete tells me Freddie Gonzalez bailed out. Some crap with his paperwork. "

"I don't get why–"

"It's too late for them to make calls for a replacement. So I say to Pete, 'Hey, Chick's around.' "

"Dad. I'm not around. "

"You can be. He don't know where you're at. " "An Old Timers game? "

"So he says, 'Oh, yeah? Chick is?' And I say, “Yeah, in good shape, too–' " "Dad–"

"And so Pete says–" "Dad–"

I knew where this was going. I knew it immediately. The only person who had a harder time giving up my baseball career than me was my father.

"Pete says they'll put you on the roster. All's you got to do is– " "Dad, I only played–"

"Get up here–"

"Six weeks in the majors–" "Around ten A.M.–"

"I only played–" "And then–"

"You can't do an Old Timers game with–" "What's your problem, Chick?

"

I hate that question. What's your problem? There is no good answer except, "I don't have a problem. " Which clearly was not true.

I sighed. "They said they'd put me on the roster? " "That's what I'm saying–"