Lost Art of Mixing (9781101609187) (14 page)

The streamers on Isabelle's throne fluttered in the early spring breeze, trailing out behind. Isabelle could feel the air moving across her face, the voices of the people below her. She closed her eyes and let her mind relax. She was up in the sky, the engine of the crop duster vibrating beneath her feet as it soared over the fields and the spectators in the bandstands. Isabelle stood, feeling the motion below, and opened her arms to the world around her.

C
hrist, Abby sighed, looking at the glacial impasse of her mother's closet, she'd never get her moved out of here.

She'd heard stories from her friends—they were all facing the same thing—about the endless negotiations, a mother's refusal to give up a silver chafing dish or jars of coriander or cayenne pepper so old and dusty that their contents could have been interchanged without any impact on flavor. Attics and garages packed with bassinets and badminton rackets, hand-painted bird feeders, six-packs of Bud Light for a husband who had died ten years before—boxes of now grown children's artwork pushing up through it all like underbrush among trees.

“Every forest needs a fire occasionally to be healthy,” Abby's friend Janey had said to her own mother, only to be proudly shown a collection of Smokey the Bear paintings Janey had created when she was seven.

It had become a favorite topic of conversation among Abby's female friends at parties. And it was the women, Abby thought. While the men were discussing sports and gadgets, the women talked about their children, their parents—the way as soon as one set grew up, the other started falling apart, just when you had finally spotted a clean and unencumbered horizon.

“Every damn safety pin has a thirty-minute story attached,” Janey had complained to Abby after a weekend at her parents' home. “It's like trying to move a freaking elephant.”

Abby nodded. She'd seen it with Isabelle, the way things could become so permeated with memories that story was more important than function. She'd watched her brother listening to Isabelle's meandering tales of the china that had been used once, on a great-grandmother's wedding day, before her husband ran off with her sister. The way, after the story had made its journey from the china to Rory's ears, the plates themselves seemed to take up less space, become almost expendable.

If she could just get some interesting stories, Abby thought, it might be bearable. But Abby would pick the seemingly most innocuous item in a drawer—a rusty garlic press, a third bottle opener—thinking it might be a good icebreaker, the easy thing to pitch into the trash or charity pile and give her mother the rush of weightlessness that came from getting rid of things, a feeling that just might steamroll them through a whole shelf, a drawer—only to be sucked into an endless explanation of how that particular opener was necessary to open the special bottles of soda Rory liked to drink in the summer. And Abby would close her mouth against the desire to tell her mother that they didn't even make that kind of soda anymore and that Rory, when he visited, if he visited, always came in the fall or spring.

Where had all this stuff come from? Abby wondered, looking at her mother's closet. Isabelle had taken almost nothing to that cabin when she'd sold their family home. She'd moved into the city only ten years ago. And yet, she had managed to accumulate quite a pile. The prospect of the sheer weight of her mother's belongings landing on Abby's head, in her garage, made her feel slightly desperate. Abby couldn't imagine what would happen to the few islands of order and sanity that existed in her life if she was forced to admit entry to the hoards of her mother's possessions.

It was easier when the question of keep-or-pitch could be laid at the door of less personal offenders—mold, dust, insects—agents of destruction Abby had always viewed with abhorrence, now her main allies in the winnowing of her mother's belongings.

“You can't keep this,” she would tell her mother, holding up a sweater Swiss-cheesed by moths.

“Don't you like the color?” Isabelle would answer.

Sometimes, at the end of a particularly unproductive sorting session, Abby would find herself sneaking objects into her purse, to be disposed of later with a relief that seemed far more satisfying than she was comfortable with.

Although, of course, Isabelle always noticed. Abby wondered how her mother, who couldn't even remember her own grandchild's name, could always seem to spot when something was missing.

“I had it on my desk,” she would tell Abby over the phone. Not “How was your flight home?” Not “Thank you for coming.” Just “Do you know where my black stapler is?”

And yet, Abby thought, looking in her mother's closet, in all those thousands of objects, there was not one sign of Abby's father, as if, when he left, the vacuum he created sucked all evidence of him from her mother's life.

•   •   •

WHEN ABBY WAS GROWING UP,
her father was the briefcase by the front door, the man reading the paper on Sundays. He was not at her dance recitals or the science fair. He was not behind the wheel, picking her up after a high school dance. She didn't expect him to be, any more than her friends expected their fathers to fly. Abby had learned early on the tricks to pull the high beams of her father's attention in her direction. He liked things straight and clean; he believed in hard work and charts with stars, and Abby conscientiously filled in the one she had put on the refrigerator door, even when her mother laughed and said love wasn't born in boxes.

That was just the kind of thing Abby's mother was always saying. As if she had any idea of how the world worked. She, who had once driven the kids to school in her bathrobe when the alarm didn't go off and Abby had woken them all up in a panic. Even when she was young, Abby understood why her father sometimes treated her mother as if she was one of the children. Given the choice, Abby would have followed her father to work. She had visited
his office when she was five and had fallen in love with its white walls and clean surfaces. People had commented on her intelligence, calling her the little doctor. She had wanted to stay there forever.

Lucy and Rory, snuggled together beneath the overhang of Abby's status as eldest, never saw things the way she did. They viewed their mother as imaginative, creative, fun—the only mom on the block who would play with the kids. They didn't see the way their mother's paint-splattered blouses were viewed by the neighbors, or catch the disappointment in their father's eyes. Abby's siblings had been well asleep on the nights when Abby snuck downstairs to eavesdrop on their parents at the dinner table—the tense cutting and chewing of food and words. Lucy and Rory had never sat on the staircase, bent legs stiffening into wishbones, willing the two people at the table to be a family, knowing she could make it work if only she sat there long enough.

And it had worked, for years—although neither her parents nor her siblings seemed particularly grateful for her efforts. Rory had been sanguine about their parents' breakup when it happened; he said that their mother deserved to be her own person, finally. Rory, the budding archaeologist, studying to become the collector of everyone's past, had had no trouble letting go of his own. And Lucy, twenty years old at that point, enthralled with her new baby and a proselyte to a vision of a liberated motherhood, could only look at her mother's marriage with a kind of hormone-drenched sympathy.

Lucy still wasn't much more help, when it came right down to it. Lucy had moved to Australia more than twenty-five years ago—permanent walkabout, Abby's husband, Bob, liked to call it—and had come home just a few times since. Abby and Bob had visited her once, before Rory was born. Lucy's brood had swarmed down the steps of a big old farmhouse to meet them, and Abby and Bob had spent the week in a world of tie-dye and chicken coops. Abby watched her sister, unable to decide if she was completely frustrated by Lucy's
It will all work out
attitude or jealous because it always seemed to.

These days, Abby would call her sister over those gazillion miles of phone cable and try and make plans for their mother, and Lucy would merely laugh and tell Abby to chill out. Lucy seemed to view their mother's illness through a gauzy sentimentality, Alzheimer's benevolently offering their mother a kind of fugue state where Isabelle would be blessed with the experience of relating simply to her own senses and emotions.

“Wouldn't it be nice not to worry sometimes, Abby?” Lucy had asked.

Except that particular fairy tale held up only if you were thousands of miles away, geographically relieved of responsibility. If you lived nearby, a plane hop, if you did any research at all, you could see what was coming. The slow disintegration of personality, inhibitions giving way to frustration and anger and paranoia. The increasing inability to read and write and eventually eat or speak. It wasn't easy, or sweet, or lovely. The studies said that thirty percent of caregivers died before their patients. Cold, hard facts—which you didn't have to be a doctor to find out about.

When Abby was younger, her mother had, for several years, driven all three children up the coast to the cabin that Isabelle had inherited the spring Abby turned seven. The drive was long, the children restless, and in an effort to keep their minds and bodies contained, their mother had told them stories. Back then, Isabelle's stories had been capacious, three-dimensional affairs, illuminated by particulars—the quality of light on a wall in France, the iridescence of a woman's midnight-blue cocktail dress—the imagery sneaking into the book Abby was trying to read, while Lucy and Rory sat listening, mouths open in fascination.

And every year, they had passed an ancient barn on the side of the highway about two-thirds of the way through the trip, when the long, blond stretches of California gave way to the trees and saturated greens of Oregon. Abby noticed the barn the first time, its gray boards sagging under the weight of years and weather, and each year after it became a competition to see who could spot it first.

Rory and Lucy were fascinated by the barn and the tales their mother would make up about its history and the land around it, the generations of people who had lived there. Each year, the rafters of the barn seemed to be swooning a bit deeper, as if bowing toward a gentler time. But Abby's siblings never seemed to see the inexorability of it all, the reality of boards finally splayed flat on the ground; they focused on the barn, when the real power lay in gravity. They still hadn't learned that lesson.

“Be with her now,” Rory had said as he and Abby argued in the bedroom of their mother's house that afternoon.

But who was going to be with her later? Abby wondered, staring at her mother's closet. Chloe was an almost acceptable stopgap measure, but Isabelle was getting to a point where she needed more structured care and it would be up to Abby, the doctor daughter living in San Francisco—which was at least on the same coast, the same continent, for God's sake—to be the bad guy in the situation.
That
role she could remember.

“See anything you like?” Isabelle came up next to Abby and peered into the closet.

“It's a bit full,” Abby remarked.

“Indeed.” Isabelle nodded thoughtfully. “We'll need to do something about that someday.”

•   •   •

“RORY,
seriously, we have to have a plan.”

Abby had cornered her brother in the kitchen. They had done the neighborhood processional, carrying about that bizarre chair, enduring the stares of the neighbors. They'd avoided catastrophe. (Thank God for that tall boy catching Isabelle when she stood. What the hell had she been thinking, anyway?) Now they were home and her mother was safe on the living room couch, flanked by the woman chef and Chloe.

“I don't want to have this conversation today,” Rory said to Abby.

“Which just means I'll do it.”

“Abby,” he said, shaking his head in frustration, “do you ever stop to think that if you didn't do it, we might?”

Memories swarmed in Abby's head. Rory about to head off to the high school prom having completely forgotten the corsage for his date, Abby stealing a rose from the next-door neighbor's yard and making one with the pink ribbon she'd saved from a birthday present. Lucy, sixteen, pregnant; Abby finding the abortion clinic. Not telling Mom. Abby, going to their father ten years ago, making sure that Isabelle was covered in his will, regardless of the second wife, the second family.

“No,” Abby said to her brother. “I don't.”

•   •   •

ABBY WENT OUT
into the backyard and pulled out her cell phone, exhaling in relief when she heard her husband pick up the line.

“Bob?” she said. “Talk me down.”

“Is it your mom or your siblings?”

“Both.”

“Well, then. Come home.” His voice warm, seductively matter-of-fact.

“I swear to God it's like they're all channeling Deepak Chopra. I'm going to kill someone.”

“You won't.”

“I just needed to hear your voice.”

“I know. I love you. Fly safe.”

She could tell from his almost imperceptible restraint that she was skittering in and out of the “Isabelle's daughter voice” that drove him crazy, but he was too kind, or smart, to say anything about it just then. It always took her a couple of days to get back to herself after a trip to her mother's—family lag, she and Bob called it—but they were used to the transitions by now. Abby recalled, with the first real smile of her day, how, about day three, he would come home from the office, look at her and say, “There you are,” and take her off to bed.