One True Thing (11 page)

“I just want you to be comfortable,” I said.

“You want me to be dead. You want me to die so you and your father can get on with your lives.”

She was wrong. I had hoped the wheelchair would give her back some of her dignity, not take it away. And I’d hoped I’d get her back, too, for a few weeks more, another book perhaps, another series of lessons in her old familiar domestic life. But I knew the only thing that would restore her to her old self, bouncing on the balls of her feet, baking the day away with flour in her hair, keeping her dark feelings inside, was the clean slate of death. Then that Kate Gulden would live always in my mind. I was frightened of this other Kate, this enraged and dessicated impostor. She was right about that; I did want that angry stranger gone. For so long I had wondered why she was not angrier at my father, at her lot in life, at the bargain she had made. But as I saw her rage, felt it like a black thing with teeth and claws, I blessed her tranquillity, and yearned for it.

I tried to tell Jonathan all this. Dr. Cohn was right; I needed someone to talk to. After we made love I lay staring up at the ceiling fan, tears running down the sides of my face, and said, “If I had any guts at all I would hold a pillow over her face.”

“Don’t say things like that,” Jonathan said.

“Oh, Jonathan, you don’t know. You’re drinking coffee in the cafeteria and working on your moot court arguments and I’m watching this woman start to slowly disintegrate before my eyes, and all I can think is, this is my last chance to know her, to be her,
to not kiss her off because she doesn’t work or she didn’t graduate from an Ivy League school or she doesn’t think the world rises and falls on whether or not there was really a Dark Lady behind Shakespeare’s sonnets. And the days slip by. She hates Elizabeth Bennet, can you believe it? Just hates her.”

“Who the hell is Elizabeth Bennet?”

“Pride and Prejudice.”

“Oh, well, then, that explains it,” Jonathan said, leaning up on one elbow, his face caught in the last bit of daylight shining through the blinds in his bedroom. “Listen, Ellen, you need some rest. You are going to go crazy with this. Can’t Papa George give you a break so you can spend the weekend with me?”

“I can’t go anywhere, Jonathan. I can’t tell from day to day whether she’ll be all right or not.”

“I think you’re being too hard on yourself.”

“There’s no such thing as being too hard on yourself, Jon.”

“Is there such a thing as being too hard?” he said, moving quickly from death to sex, his favorite subject, as he pushed my head down.

Afterward we dressed and drove back to my house. “Do you realize that during the entire thing we never kissed?” I said.

“Oh, Christ, Ellen, calm down,” Jon said, sated now and irritable.

I spent the rest of that evening creaming onions, peeling yams, making stuffing exactly as my mother directed, producing a great groaning board of dishes just as she always had. After Jonathan brought me home, as I stood in the kitchen in my nightgown slicing celery, I realized that I was doing it all for the sake of stability, to make it seem as though this Thanksgiving was no different from any other. I was maintaining, abetting, creating a kind of elaborate fiction, just as my mother had, with gravy and pumpkin pie and heavy cream. The fiction that everything was fine, that life was simple and secure, that husbands did not stray and children grow, that the body did not decay and finally fail, that the axis of the earth passed dead center through the kitchen and the living
world and the world kept spinning, our family unchanging, safe and sound.

My mother looked horrid on Thanksgiving morning; she had made up her face elaborately, as though somehow she could create her own fiction with blush and eye shadow, the fiction that she was well, that she was blooming. But my brothers did not collaborate; instead of making the rounds of friends’ houses that afternoon, they stayed at home, wandering in and out of the kitchen, talking of school and asking about home. They settled into the couch with Jonathan for the football games. My father sat with them, reading and making derogatory comments. “The greatest single collection of future car-dealership owners and fast-food-restaurant franchise magnates in the United States,” he said.

“So Rod Laver is a teaching pro at a country club right now,” said Jeff. “Big difference.”

“Tennis has finesse,” said my father. “Tennis has style and grace.”

“The sport of kings,” said Jonathan.

“Come off it, Jon,” said Jeffrey. “You love football. The only thing I’ve ever seen take your mind off yourself is the Super Bowl.”

“And Wimbledon,” Jonathan said. “And I wasn’t agreeing. I was commenting.”

“Sucking up,” muttered Jeff.

“God, I hate that expression,” my father said. He turned to me, then looked into the kitchen. “Where’s your mother?”

“She’s upstairs with Brian.”

“Don’t make her feel superfluous, Ellen,” my father said.

“And don’t make me feel guilty.”

I basted and rearranged the cheesecloth that was draped around my turkey like a shroud. I was beginning to talk about food the way my mother did: my stuffing, my yams, my turkey. My zucchini soup. It would always be my zucchini soup, with a cup of tea in it.

Upstairs my mother was settled in the big chair by the window in her room, her feet up on the ottoman. She was wearing a handsome
plum-colored dress with big brass buttons which I had bought her at the mall; when she saw that the label had been cut out she was so pleased. “A bargain!” she said. “How much?”

“None of your business,” I said with a grin, as though I had gotten the dress for next to nothing. In fact it had cost seventy dollars, and I had taken the label out because it read
MOTHER AND CHILD
. Maternity clothes, my mother needed now, to accommodate her poor swollen belly.

When I went up to check on her, Brian was sitting crosslegged next to the ottoman, a book in his lap, reading aloud. As I came in he slid the book beneath the ruffled skirt of the chair.

“What have you got there, Bri?” I asked.
“Tropic of Cancer? Peyton Place? Story of O
?”

“Much worse,” my mother said.

Brian slid the book out again and held it up. It was a Gothic novel, with a cover illustration of a woman in ruffled petticoats being pressed to the highly defined pectoral muscles of a man wearing only jodphurs. “Your father will call the police,” my mother said, giggling.

“The thought police,” said Brian. “They would all be wearing tweed jackets and they would deprogram you by making you read the
Oxford English Dictionary.”

“Oh, honey,” said my mother, giggling again, “don’t make fun of the
OED.”

“They take you in a room and put headphones on you and make you listen to Orson Welles read
Silas Marner,”
I said.

“Now, there’s a real mystery,” my mother said. “How someone wrote a book as good as
Middlemarch
and then wrote a book as boring as
Silas Marner
. Jeffrey would say she was all over the map.”

“Oh, Ma,” said Brian. “The person who wrote
Silas Marner
was a guy. George Eliot.”

My mother and I screamed and held our heads. “Oh, my God, Bri,” I said, “if Papa heard you you’d be on the road with your thumb out, on your way back to Philadelphia. George Eliot was a woman. It was a pen name. Her real name was Mary Ann Evans.”

“Are you sure?” said Brian.

“Honey, it’s okay,” I said. “You’re going to major in political science. Just don’t let Papa hear you. That and this”—I nudged the paperback with my foot—“would finish him off. I can see it:
PROF KILLED BY BAD LITERARY TASTE: SON HELD.”

There was a knock at the door and when my father looked in, we all began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” he said.

“A case of mistaken identity,” I said.

When the food was on the table in the dining room, on the mahogany table with its matching breakfront and china closet and chairs that had once belonged to my grandparents, my mother took Brian’s and Jeffrey’s hands and said, “I want to say grace.” And for the first time in years we did:

“Thank you for the world so sweet, thank you for the food we eat, thank you for the birds that sing, thank you, God, for everything.”

When I raised my head and dropped my father’s hand I looked at him and there were tears in his eyes.

For dessert I had made pumpkin pie, and as I was in the kitchen cutting it my mother came in. She looked tired and she’d eaten all her lipstick off, leaving only the edge of it, like false wax lips from Halloween.

“I need a pill, Ellen,” she said.

“Mama, I gave you one just after lunch. It’s only been four hours.”

“Ellen, I need a pill. Where are they?”

“They’re in the cabinet in the powder room. Can’t you wait until after dessert?”

“Get me a pill, please, Ellen,” my mother said, so loudly that all conversation stopped in the next room. “And remember that this is still my house.” I could hear the edge of one of those rages in her voice, and as she returned to the table I went to the medicine cabinet.

I heard her say to Brian, “Now—I want a full report on the roommate and any suitable girls.”

“And you can tell me when we go out later about all the unsuitable ones,” Jeff said.

But Brian did not go out with the rest of us. He helped my mother to bed after we’d had our coffee in the living room; he sat in her room after she’d dozed off, listening to her breathe in the dark. “Don’t fall asleep here,” I whispered, but he didn’t reply, and I knew he’d be there until my father came up. I remember thinking that if they gave any of us an aptitude test for taking care of Kate Gulden when she was mortally ill, Brian, sweet and earnest Brian, would have aced it. Jeff once had described us all: “The food chain is that Ellen lives up to Pop, and I live up to Ellen.” A little plaintively Bri had said, “What about me?”

“You don’t have to live up to anyone, kid,” Jeff said. “You and Mom just have to get up every morning and be present on the planet.”

S
o predictable, that it would all begin to unravel in a bar. That was where we went after the dinner dishes were done, Jonathan and Jeff and I, to a bar called Sammy’s, named in honor of Samuel Langhorne, who was about as much a Sammy as Thomas Jefferson was a Tommy or John Adams a Jack. The place was one of those dark English-pub imitations, with cheap, mass-produced stained-glass windows and a big dark wood bar with heraldic nonsense fixed to its front. It was full of town kids home for Thanksgiving break and the community college kids, who wished they were. Jeff had to wade through a sea of glad hands and big smiles. One girl ran her hand up his khaki leg from knee to thigh and said, “Come over to see me.”

“Who was that?” Jonathan asked.

“A very happy woman,” said Jeff. “Name of Jennifer.”

“They’re all Jennifers,” I said. “When our mothers were young, they were all Kathys and Pattys. In ten years they’ll all be Ashleys and Taras.”

“Aren’t you tough!” said Jeff.

“My middle name.”

“Yeah, you put on a good show, El. But I see through you.”

“Deep down inside a romantic?”

“Deep down inside a softie.”

“This conversation is like a Kahlil Gibran sitcom, for Christsake,” said Jonathan. He smiled over at Jennifer, who smiled at him. I slipped my hand into the back pocket of his jeans.

“I’ll cut it off, Jon,” I whispered as we sat down at a table, a slab of heavy varnished wood with a round red votive candle winking at its center.

I hadn’t had a drink since the day I’d come back to Langhorne. It didn’t feel right; it didn’t parse. Neither had the seal of sex I’d felt between my legs as I’d cooked and cleaned the night before in my mother’s house. I thought about it as the need to be in control, to be there for her in every way, in case of some crisis, some emergency. I thought about how terrible it would be if she was left to suffer alone while I took my forays into pleasure in Jonathan’s boyhood bedroom with the pennants still tacked over the bed, if she called out and I was too muddled by wine to hear.

But now, when I analyze my own behavior, I think I felt obliged to deny myself anything carnal, a frisson of lust, the blur of a shot of vodka, to help pay for her pain, as though pleasure was an affront to her.

That night in Sammy’s, with Jonathan smiling that promising smile across the table at me, the red light making amber shadows on his face, I forgot all that. I had two beers, then something called a Samuel Sling, fruit juice and a muddle of different liquors, one of those drinks that go down so easy and make your head swim so fast. Under the table I ran my foot up the inside of Jonathan’s thigh. The two men talked about the football, their course work, their professors. In the middle of a sentence I cut Jeff off.

“He just kills me,” I said.

“Who?” said Jon. But Jeff knew.

“My father. He just kills me. He sat there and let you guys clear the table. He didn’t say a word to me about dinner. And he goes
off before she’s even asleep and says he has work to do in his study. As though we were servants. As though we’re there to serve him. Jesus.” I signaled the waitress across the room. “We need another round,” I called.

“The hell you do,” Jeff muttered.

“This is what it’s been like from day one, Jeffie,” I said. “He is literally never there. I literally do everything.”

“Does your mother complain?” said Jonathan.

“That’s not the point,” I said loudly.

“El, the entire bar doesn’t have to share this with us,” said Jeff. He shrugged and looked at Jon. “My mother never complains about anything.”

“Exactly,” I said. “And now she can’t because he’s never around.”

“He was never around before,” said Jeff.

“She was never dying before,” I said.

“Everyone deals with bad stuff in their own way,” Jon added.

“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it, Jon?” I said. “Whenever one of you guys says people deal with bad stuff in their own way, it means you don’t deal with it at all. You just wait for it to go away. You don’t help. You don’t listen. You don’t call. You don’t write. WE deal with it in our own way. WE deal with it. We girls. We make the meals and clean up the messes and take the crap and listen to you talk about how you’re dealing with it in your own way. What way? No way!”