One True Thing (16 page)

What a dope, I thought to myself as I tilted bows downward.

“Linda, you’re being silly,” my mother said, but from the gay tone of her voice I could tell that she agreed completely, with Linda Best and with me, too. “It looks beautiful, and the children will love the soldiers. Do you have any more?”

“Tons,” said Mrs. Best.

“Load ’em on,” my mother said, as I cut my finger on one of the wires. “More is more.”

I wasn’t sure why she seemed so indefatigable that day, whether it was the brilliant weather, the pleasure she took in making things pretty, the return to something she’d done for so many years, or the competition—“the Super Bowl of home decor aficionados” my father had called it that morning at breakfast. Certainly my mother seemed a good deal happier at Mrs. Best’s chagrin than was charitable, and at the improvement in the Best tree as Mrs. Best hung soldiers from every bare inch of branch.

Or perhaps it had been that she had gone out with my father the night before, dressed in her cranberry shift, the gold brooch of a bow with pavé diamonds at its knot pulling down one shoulder of the dress, which had already grown far too big for her. She’d made herself up painstakingly, but because her hands were unsteady her lipstick was, too, and her eyeliner looked a little like the stuttery lines on some hospital monitor.

She timed her morphine carefully so that the hours when she got most relief and least sleepiness would come during dinner and the chamber music concert they planned for later. She wore her fur coat and bent her head to rub her cheek against its soft collar.

When she and my father had driven away I sat on the living-room couch with my hands in my lap and tried to make a plan for my own evening. I had been so busy arranging for her dress, her medication, where her wheelchair would go in the car, that I had
forgotten that for the first time in many months I would be alone. I called Jonathan, but he was not home and I left a breezy message on his machine: “Just called to check in. Call me if you have a chance.” When I heard the recording of Jules saying, “Can’t come to the phone right now …” I hung up.

But after I found
All About Eve
on a cable channel, ate some ice cream from the container, and had a light beer, I felt more like my old self, the Ellen Gulden who had walked around her little downtown apartment touching things her first night—sink, stove, bathroom taps—thinking “Mine, mine, mine.”

Jonathan was not coming home for Christmas. He’d be doing three fulltime weeks of data processing; it would pay for his summer sublet. He had plenty of schoolwork to do, too, he’d said. And perhaps he had a first-year law student who loved the way he ran his tongue over his upper lip and made impudent eye contact as they talked about torts.

The pressure and pain behind my eyes and in my jaw was intense, maybe from the beer, and I wondered how morphine would go down with alcohol. On the TV Eve Harrington became a big star but sold her soul to that dandy of a devil, Addison deWitt. I’d never thought it seemed like such a bad bargain, although I’d have known better than to cross Bette Davis, with those mean sleepy eyes and that hard fish mouth.

The next movie was
High Noon
. I hated Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly—“so white bread,” Jules and I would always say in unison—and I turned the television off just as a car door slammed outside.

Even before they got in the house I could tell that my parents’ evening had not gone well. I could hear my mother arguing outside in the drive, and when my father opened the door with her clinging awkwardly to his arm, his face was white, his eyes dark.

“…they were all looking,” I heard her say as he helped her over to the couch, where she lay down slowly, in careful stages, her pumps left on the floor like a memento.

“I’ll get the chair,” I said.

When I came back in, my father had turned on the lamps and was in the kitchen. I could tell from the sounds of cabinet doors and canisters that he was making tea. My mother’s eyes were closed, but she was biting her lower lip. When she opened her mouth there was lipstick on her teeth. Mascara was gathered at the corners of her eyes, smudgy shadows.

“Disaster,” she whispered.

My father came in with a mug and handed it to her. She raised her head and shoulders to sip, then put it on the coffee table and fell back.

“I am never going out again,” she said.

“Oh, nonsense, Kate,” my father said. “A thousand people have dozed off during chamber music in the chapel. The president has done it nearly every time in my memory. Why shouldn’t you?”

“Because I never would have before and they all knew why I did it tonight. I remember the Vivaldi and a little of the Mozart and then the next thing I know I’m waking up with spit all over my chin and everyone staring—”

“No one was staring,” my father said. “They were getting ready to leave and gathering up their things.”

“They were staring. At the restaurant people stared, too. And then you made the fuss about the chair—”

“The doors should be wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs. It’s the law. The restaurant was negligent.”

“—and you used that word,” my mother continued, the pitch of her voice climbing. “You used that word!”

“I’m sorry,” my father said.

“I am not handicapped, and don’t you forget it. Either of you. I am not handicapped. I’m just weak. And woozy. I get woozy. That’s why I need this thing.”

“I said there were laws about accommodating the handicapped. I did not suggest that you were handicapped.”

“Don’t say that word,” she said. “Don’t say it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

I went into the kitchen and made myself a cup of tea. But when
I went back to the living room, my father was kneeling beside the sofa with his head in my mother’s lap and she was smoothing his hair. They were talking to one another, but I could not hear the words, only the plaintive tones of one and the murmurings of the other. I went back into the kitchen and poured the tea into the sink, threw away the empty ice-cream container, took two aspirin for the pain behind my eyes, and decided to go to bed. The house was quiet except for the faint hum of the furnace from the basement, just discernible through the floorboards.

I went through the hallway to the stairs, past the watercolor portraits of Brian at six, Jeffrey at eight, Ellie at eleven with serious eyes and mouth and a pink ribbon holding back her dark hair. But my parents were there ahead of me, my father three steps up, carrying my mother, who had her head on his shoulder.

“I’m so tired, Gen,” she said quietly, without ever knowing I was there.

“I know, dear heart,” he replied.

The next morning my father said the dinner had been a fiasco. “If she were a child she would have been described as playing with her food,” he said, then drained his coffee cup, picked up his book bag, and left for his nine o’clock class before she could come downstairs. Yet when she did come down she was all lit up, dreamy, smiling, with the lines softened around her mouth and on her forehead. And she stayed that way all that day.

My father, before he went to work, had been merely distracted; his hair was awry, and there was a spot of blood on his collar to match the nick on the underside of his chin. All the lines on his face looked deeper, as though he’d had a bad portrait done, or an unforgiving black-and-white photograph. “What class do you have?” I’d asked as I handed him coffee.

“Women in Dickens,” he said.

“Miss Havisham and Estella? Or the wimps, Little Dorrit and Dora and David’s sainted mother?”

“All,” he said, standing up.

“What about his wife and his mistress?”

“Only the work, not the biography,” he said. “Ellen, the buttons have broken on the collars of two of my shirts. I put them on the chair in the bedroom. Could you see that they’re replaced? And I’d rather we had the skim than the whole milk. Or get both and give the whole milk to your mother. Your brothers will be home on Thursday afternoon so they’ll need plenty to eat.”

“But how can you separate the work from the biography?”

“What?”

“Dickens. How can you illuminate the work if you separate the work from the biography?”

“You know the stock answer to that,” he said, distracted. “The work stands alone. Does the nurse come again soon?”

“Monday.”

“Your mother liked her. She said last night that she found her helpful.”

“She’s good,” I said.

“The doctor has decided to discontinue the chemotherapy,” my father said.

“What?”

“She spoke to your mother the other day at the hospital, when you took her over. She told me last night. Dr. Cohn decided that it’s not having much of an effect.” He went into the hall for his briefcase. “I’ll meet you at seven here for the tree ceremony.”

“That’s it? That’s all? No more chemo? End of sentence? End of discussion?”

“What more is there to say?” my father said, and left for work.

T
he night they lit the Christmas trees on the green was a perfect night of its kind in Langhorne. In summer there would be those dark nights with a cool breeze blowing faintly and the passing scent of petunias in the air, nights that veered between hot and not so hot so that when you went skinny-dipping in the reservoir you would get out and then jump back in because the water felt warmer than the air.

In fall there were the sweater days, football days, when the sun shone clear but light yellow, the color of white corn, and as you walked down the street a leaf would pirouette to the sidewalk right before your eyes, almost brushing your nose, and late at night the rumble of the furnace would suddenly shake the house like a snore.

And spring, what there ever was of it, was all beautiful, the pure smell of wet and fresh and the daffodils sashaying on the green, in our yards, in hidden wild patches on the hillside sloping down to the river amid the damp grass.

And in winter there were nights like the one when they lit the
trees that year, when the sky hung down like black silk punched full of holes so that the bright light behind could shine out in tiny points, thousands of them. The air burnt your tongue a bit with its cold, and the bony fingers of the bare tree branches reached up to lay hands on a full moon. It was bright outdoors, silver-bright, with the long black shadows of shrubs, houses, people walking down the sidewalk and staring up at the moon as though it was moving the tides of their lives and they could feel the ebb and flow inside them.

Usually on a night like that in Langhorne you’d only know how perfect it was when you went to take the garbage out and were dazzled, or came in late from work or a movie and stopped to marvel. After dark people stayed home in Langhorne, not because there was anything to fear, but because our houses—our kitchens, our dens, our bedrooms—were where our lives took place.

If a stranger walked the streets, which had never happened in my memory, he would see from the sidewalk one imagined oasis after another of yellow light and easy love: a woman’s head at a kitchen window, her arms moving in slow and steady patterns as she washed dishes; children passing to and fro in their rooms looking for pencils or turning down the stereo on command; men dozing in big comfortable chairs. Outside on the cold streets you would see no one, except perhaps some child walking home from a friend’s house after working on a school project, the pyramids in papier-mâché, a disquisition on
Romeo and Juliet
and family discord. You would hear nothing except for the faint sounds from within those houses, of piano practice and the water running and the commentators from
Wide World of Sports
.

But the night they lit the trees was different. Whole families, their collars turned up against, not the cold, but the idea of cold, of how cold it ought to be in the shadow of Christmas, came down the street to the green. From inside our house we could hear the murmur of their voices outside, a drone like that of bees around the hydrangea bushes on one of the perfect summer days.

My mother was upstairs getting dressed, and I was packing a
bag with her pills, extra gloves, and four Christmas ornaments that we had not put on her tree, just in case, she said, although it was hard to tell what “in case” meant. She’d put on an old pair of wool slacks, cinched tightly under a red turtleneck and the red sweater with reindeer leaping across it that she wore every year to the tree ceremony. She came down the stairs slowly, holding tightly to the banister, then settled herself in her chair and pulled her beret over what little was left of her hair.

“No coat?” said my father.

“I don’t need a coat,” she said. “I’m layered. Besides, I want to show off my sweater.”

I was wearing red, too, and my father a green loden coat, and together we made a festive group, with our beribboned wheelchair. My father pushed the chair and I walked alongside. The moon touched the handles and made silver pools of its own reflection. My mother tipped her head back to look up.

“Beautiful night,” she said softly.

The road around the green was packed with people, the crowd so large that some stood on the streets that fanned out from the hub. But we were able to push right through because my mother and the other Minnies were given a place at the front, next to the podium from which the mayor gave the signal to light the trees.

“Hey, Mrs. Gulden?” said Hetty Belknap, who for all her childhood had been known as Hugh and Sophie Belknap’s change-of-life baby, a scrawny little girl with freckles and sandy hair that looked as if she’d cut it herself, perhaps with manicure scissors.

“What, sweetie?” my mother said.

“I like how you decorated your wheels,” she said, and her father gave her a stern look. “I didn’t say anything about her being sick,” Hetty whined as he led her away.

“Hey, Ellen,” said a young police officer keeping the crowd back, whose name I couldn’t quite recall until months later when I saw him at the municipal building.

“Well, how are you?” I said brightly. “Look at you in your uniform.”

“Ellen’s imitating me, Gen,” said my mother, giving me a wink.