The Law of Loving Others (11 page)

WAKING up early the next day, I felt strangely revitalized, purposeful. My mornings were usually so sluggish. I could've been in bed for at least another hour, snoozing my alarm clock for ten, fifteen minutes at a time. But that morning I felt instantly alert and ready to go. I just wanted a little bit of time alone with my mother, an hour or two at the hospital without my father and his needless chatter, his relentless cheerfulness.

I went into the den before I left and my father was sitting on the couch with the
Times
spread out in front of him on the coffee table, eating a bagel over his lap. There were seeds sprinkled everywhere— poppy, caraway, sesame, and little grains of salt all over his thighs. This was my mother's worst nightmare and for a second I thought,
Mom would be rolling over in her grave right now
, and then,
Jesus, she's not
dead.
What the fuck am I talking about?

“Oh, look at you,” I said. “Mom would be so mad!”

“What? Oh?” He looked down at his jeans and smiled. “Yeah, she sure would be. Can you grab me a napkin?” I handed him a paper towel with some kind of watercolor floral print that my mother always insisted on buying.

“I was thinking about visiting Mom this morning,” I told him, “like now-ish. I'm gonna leave in a few minutes.”

“Okay, are you sure? I'm planning to leave here around one or two. You don't want to wait for me, save some gas?”

“That's okay, I have plans later, but thanks.” This was a lie, but I figured I'd make plans, call someone up when I was heading back from the hospital, just to make it true.

“Okay, sure, that's no problem. And do you know what you're doing tomorrow night yet?” he asked. “I know it's sort of a strange time for all these celebratory events.”

“Yeah, I don't know, still figuring it out. What about you? I forget if you and Mom usually do something for New Year's?”

“For the past few years, we've been going to this little dinner party at the Friedmans'. Just a few couples, it's low-key. We're usually home by twelve thirty.”

“Are you still gonna go?” I asked. “Do they know about Mom?” It occurred to me that I had no idea who knew what and who didn't, or how big a secret this all was. I hadn't talked to anyone in my family; I had no idea if my grandmother even knew.

“They don't, not yet. We'll see what happens in the next few weeks, how long her hospital stay will be. I might go tomorrow and say your mother is sick. I don't know, I need to think about it. Oh, and I keep meaning to tell you, my friend Peter and I are going to the synagogue to do a soup kitchen for New Year's Day, for brunch, if you're interested. It's just a few hours, serving food. It's a really nice thing.”

I thought about New Year's Day last year. My mother had invited her friend Andrea over for brunch since she was in town for the holidays. Andrea and my mother had both skipped fifth grade, moved directly from fourth to sixth together, and had quickly clung to each other and become best friends. She was a foot taller than my mother, muscular and big-boned with wide shoulders like a swimmer, and I imagined them wandering their Queens junior high school together, Andrea guiding my mother down the hallways, through throngs of classmates who were only eleven or twelve, but who to my mother, impossibly tiny and only ten, probably seemed infinitely older.

I'd helped my mother prepare brunch for Andrea before she arrived, arranging baby carrots and cherry tomatoes on a little tray, mixing sour cream and a Lipton soup mix to make onion dip. I cut up slivers of red and yellow peppers, while my mother made a frittata with spinach and mushrooms. This was not something I would have ordinarily done—hung around while my mother had lunch with an old friend—but since going to boarding school, I found myself longing for these sorts of cozy, familial activities around the house. Just spending time with my mother as she cooked, standing beside her in our warm kitchen, wallpapered in yellow tulips, the satellite radio set to the classical station that she loved, this was what I wanted.

“Thank you for helping me, sweetie,” she'd said, and she adjusted the timer on the oven, though I knew when I walked into the den that she would probably rearrange the vegetables herself, fixing them a bit more gracefully on the teakwood tray.

Andrea arrived, and her presence seemed to instantly change the air in our mellow home, illuminating it with a burst of energy. She had three sons and was always yearning for some kind of antidote to all that testosterone.

“My girls!” She threw her arms around my mother. Her hair was past her shoulders, thick and the color of wheat. We stood at the doorway and she hugged me, saying, “You're getting so freaking old I can't believe it!”

“Come on in, let's sit,” my mother said.

We seated ourselves at the table and Andrea fawned over me in a way that was slightly embarrassing, but I could see the pleasure my mother took in it, the pride—that glint in her eyes as she rubbed my back or pulled my long hair away from my face.

“Tell her about school,” my mother said. “This place is pretty incredible, Andrea. I mean, if Emma could see what our high school was like, with all the linoleum and those tiny little wooden desks and those teachers who were totally disinterested, and five hundred people idolizing the football team. Oak Hill seems like paradise.”

“You're so lucky,” Andrea said to me, and then she turned to my mother. “But I couldn't let her go away if I were you. Even with my boys, smelly and grumpy, and their sweaty, disgusting soccer uniforms smelling up my laundry room. Even with all that, I couldn't let them go!”

“It's not easy,” my mother said. “Believe me, it's not. I start to cry every time she leaves, but we're good about talking a lot, several times a week. And it's just such a good opportunity for her; she'll go to college and it will be a breeze for her, and she's so much more sophisticated, even now, than we were at her age.”

“Okay okay,” I said. “Can you stop talking about me like I'm not here?”

“Sure, so tell me how sophisticated you are, Emma,” Andrea said, smiling at me.

“I'm not! I don't even know what she means.”

“The classes she's taking, they're just so wonderful. World history, sure, chemistry, sure, but these electives—Fellini and the Italian Cinema, The Role of Women in Fascist Germany, a whole class on Tolstoy! It's remarkable, really. And she's only a sophomore. Can you even remember the classes we used to take? They were mind-numbingly boring.”

“So boring we didn't even have to go!” Andrea said.

“Excuse me? My mother, the most dutiful and diligent student, didn't go to class?”

“Oh please, it was just senior year. I'd already gotten into college. I was still a straight-A student!”

“I'm shocked!” I said.

“Don't be too shocked,” Andrea told me. “It's not like we were taking LSD or anything, we would just cut school and stay at your grandmother's house all day and smoke cigarettes and play Scrabble. And your mother would argue with me over this word and that; it was nothing too exciting.”

Later, I went into the living room to watch TV—to zone out in front of some MTV countdown. I could hear Andrea and my mother talking and then abruptly breaking into hysterical laughter, and I remember being suddenly hit with the realization that my mother was just an ordinary woman, a person with friends, gleeful to be reunited with Andrea, the way I would be if I hadn't seen Annie for months.

It was only a year ago! I felt an ache of sadness thinking about it; it seemed like such a recent memory, such an ordinary one, really, and in some ways attainable, and yet it was in the past and could not be gotten back.

MY mother was in the middle of a group therapy session when I got to the hospital that day. I waited for her on a bench in a wide, open corridor, the walls decorated neatly with framed photographs of serene, majestic landscapes—they looked like they might have all been Ansel Adams prints, the sort that were often collected in glossy calendars or used as generic screen savers. This place was infinitely nicer than the other hospital, less sterile and terrifying—not the kind of place where horror movies were filmed, where people ended up murdering each other, or nurses poisoned their patients—but it was still a hospital. Patients walked around in this slow, lethargic way, their feet shuffling forward. Every so often there was a shriek and a scuffle. Security guards emerged quickly and then were gone.

While I waited for my mother, a man walked toward me and for a moment I couldn't tell if he was a patient or staff member. He had cropped salt-and-pepper hair and wire-rimmed glasses, but as he got closer, I could see he had something red caked on to the front of his Oxford shirt, something thick and shiny that resembled fake blood. Maybe it was ketchup or cranberry sauce.

“Are you here to see me?” the man asked, squinting as he approached me. “Did someone send you to visit me?”

“No, no, I'm waiting for my mother.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I'm sorry.”

“They said someone was coming to see me,” he insisted.

I shrugged my shoulders, tried to smile in an apologetic sort of way.

“People don't come nearly as much as they say they will. Can you imagine what that's like? Your family throws you into a place like this, thinks because they're pouring in the money they can just leave and you'll be all set. It's a horrible thing, horrible. You know I was a real family man, in my time. I had a job, provided for my family in all the ways men are supposed to do. I made furniture, beautiful pieces of furniture, oak tables and desks. I sanded them down myself. Not like furniture these days that's shipped from who knows where, made by Chinamen or some kids in a factory. This was American, handmade. It was beautiful. I had a wife! Two children. Three, really, but one of them didn't make it. Died just a week after she was born. Anyhow, you wouldn't believe how successful I was, really.”

I imagined he would go on and on with his sorrowful autobiography, but a moment later my mother appeared. She looked exhausted and weak, her veins pronounced like a faint blue subway map beneath her skin. It seemed almost impossible that I had seen her just the day before. Her hair was so greasy, and this was what she would have hated most. Throughout my childhood she was fastidious about washing her hair and mine.
Squeaky clean
, she used to say. Once or twice when I was a kid and she had a stomach virus or the flu, this would be the first thing she'd mention:
My hair is so greasy, don't look at me!
But now this was clearly so far from her mind.

We went into the dining room, which was being set up for lunch. There were a couple of people playing cards at the table next to us. One of them had his back to me, but the other guy, whose face I saw, looked so familiar, though I couldn't place him. There was something about his eyes, the slope of his nose. He was thin, so thin that his cheeks had that sunken look to them. He was a patient, I assumed, and he was wearing a dark gray sweatshirt that was zipped all the way up. He had the same absent stare as my mother, that overmedicated kind of look. As if all the life had been drained out of him. I tried to imagine what had brought him here—maybe he swallowed a handful of pills or had some kind of delusional mania where he was convinced he was a prophet and spent days in a row preaching to his imaginary followers until he finally surrendered himself to the hospital.

“Hey Ted, it's your turn,” I heard the guy with his back to me say. “You all right?”

“Yeah, uh-huh.” He stared at his cards, fanned them out in front of him, and then the visitor, whoever he was, stood up and walked over to the back of the room where a handful of people were preparing food and asked for a cup of water. People were removing Saran wrap from trays of vegetables, carrots, slices of peppers, and cherry tomatoes. I caught a glimpse of his face as he walked back toward the table. He nodded at me, shot me a look that was something like complicity.

It was Zach's friend. The guy from the other night, the one whose wrist I held for thirty seconds while I was applying the temporary tattoo onto his skin. The patient must have been his brother; they looked so similar, and yet they were totally different versions of the same gene pool. Zach's friend was tanner, thicker, fuller, a more fleshed-out, lively rendering of his brother.

My mother and I made small talk. I asked her about her roommate. I told her things that she didn't care about, benign details about my life that she had once been so eager to hear. I told her that Daniel and I had gotten into a fight the night before, and I was feeling so distant from him; that Annie and her boyfriend were doing really well and that she just went to Colorado with his family; I told her that the Joyce Carol Oates essay we liked in the
New Yorker
was actually part of a memoir and that it just came out and I was excited to read it.

She had barely been responding to anything I was saying, but then she looked at me. “I had to stop reading the
New Yorker
.”

“How come?”

“It's complicated, but they were sending me messages. Coded warnings in ‘Talk of the Town.' We don't have to get into it now. It's over, anyway. The instant I come into a place like this, they stop. They know I don't have access to anything interesting in here anyway. Anything remotely intellectually stimulating.”

“I can bring you things,” I told her, ignoring the rest of what she had just said. She'd been so checked out, so lost in her own thoughts that I hadn't even imagined she could possibly be bored. “I'll bring you books next time I come. What would you like?”

“It's fine,” she said dismissively. “It's fine, but thank you, that's sweet.”

I noticed earlier that there was a piano in one of the day rooms and I asked her if she'd be interested in playing.

“I am,” she said. “I think I want to do that.”

“Have you asked the social worker if you can? I'm sure they'd let you. I mean, I assume that's what it's here for.”

“The subject hasn't come up.”

“Let's make sure we do that today, before I leave, okay?”

I looked up, and Zach's friend was walking toward me. I told my mother I'd be right back.

“Hey,” I said. “Tattoo guy.”

He smiled. “Yeah, that's me. Phil.”

“This is so bizarre. Is your tattoo still on?”

He laughed and lifted up a sleeve of his flannel shirt. “A little bit, yeah,”

“Is that your brother?” I asked. He hesitated. “Sorry, you don't have to answer that.”

“No, it's fine,” Phil said. “Yeah, it is. Twin brother.”

“Wow.”

“What about you?”

“My mother.” I gestured toward her.

“When did she get here?”

“Just yesterday. What about your brother?”

“A while. It's been a few weeks.”

“How's he doing?”

“Eh, he's all right. Getting there slowly, maybe?”

“Well that's something,” I said. “I should go back to my mom, but it was really nice seeing you, considering everything.”

“Yeah. Maybe we can drive up here together or something?” He asked. “You live right near Annie and Zach , right?”

“Yeah, pretty close.”

“Are you on winter break for a while?”

“I am, yeah. A couple more weeks. What about you?”

“Like ten days,” he said. “Here, give me your number and I'll just call you so you have mine. I try to come out here every day, every couple of days.”

I gave him my number, then felt the belated buzz of my phone in my back pocket.

“Cool,” he said. “I'll be in touch.”

I was half expecting my mother to ask a million questions when I walked back over to her.
Who is that guy? How do you know him? Where did he grow up and what school does he go to?
I felt a little deflated when she didn't, though I shouldn't have been surprised. She was barely awake anyway, her eyelids fluttering open and shut.

MY aunt Elaine arrived at the hospital just as I was leaving. We almost passed by each other in the parking lot, but she spotted me as she was getting out of her car, called out to me above the gleaming roofs of SUVs. As she and my mother grew older, they had begun to look less and less alike. Elaine's hair had grown long and was impeccably styled, sleek and straight, without a single strand of gray.

“Emma!” she called, and then she rushed over to hug me, grabbed on a little too tight. “How is she? How are
you
? And how is your father doing? I've barely spoken to him the past few days. We keep missing each other. He's been such a mensch though, he really, truly has.” It was a quick flurry of questions and remarks, which was a relief, really, because it seemed as though I wasn't actually expected to answer. Elaine tapped a button on her keychain, and the headlights on her car flashed twice, in quick succession.

“I want to take you out to dinner soon,” she said, holding on to my hands. “One day after all the holidays are over and things have settled a bit? I'll come to Westchester or we can meet somewhere in the city. We'll figure it out. We can do something nice, just us girls.”

“That would be nice, thanks.”

It was bitingly cold—Elaine's cheeks turned red and my nose had started to run. Dozens of yellow leaves skidded past us in unison, like dancers who moved swiftly across a stage.

“I should head back,” I said, “but Mom will be so glad to see you.”

“Thanks, sweetheart. I'll call you soon, okay? I promise. One night next week, your choice.”

I checked my e-mail before I started to drive and most of it was nothing, spam or Facebook notifications, but there was also an e-mail from Jane, Daniel's mother.

Hi Emma, I know you're going through a really difficult time right now and I sense that you're being very brave and mature, but I would still like to take you out to lunch, sometime soon. Please. Think of it as a favor to me. You let me know when you're free. Xx.

I could feel the way these women were reaching out to me, and I knew that in some sense they were trying to fill that maternal void. But I didn't know quite what to do with it, if I even wanted that space to be occupied at all. Maybe I needed to feel the ache of my mother's absence, for at least a little while. I put my phone down, promised myself I'd respond to Jane another time.

It was the middle of the day as I drove back to Westchester. My fingers were freezing, and with my free hand I cupped my palm over the heating vent, felt it seeping out against my skin. My head was clouded with this vague sense of dread, but I didn't know how to tease the feelings apart, dismantle and separate them, analyze them like I usually did. It was all too close, too soon, and impossible to pick apart.

At home, I texted Andy and Josh, two of my friends from Westchester who I only really talked to when I was back home during school breaks. They were a couple of years older, already in college, and so our schedules had corresponded nicely. We were usually back in town around the same time. They were always hanging out, always up to something, even if it was just the two of them and a few other guys listening to old Radiohead albums and getting stoned from the makeshift gravity bong they'd set up in the bathtub. Andy texted back and said he was having people over, and I should come, and bring whoever along with me. He'd always had parties in high school and by eleventh grade he somehow managed to annex the entire third floor of his house; I don't think his parents have been up there since. It was always too dark in there—Andy went through this psychedelic phase and replaced the regular bulbs with ones that are tinted blue or red, which cast an eerie glow across the entire place. And it was always cluttered with books and old takeout containers, milk crates filled with old video games. Once I found an entire untouched pizza in a flattened cardboard box underneath the couch, coated with a thin layer of sickening green fuzz.

I wanted to go out that night, but I still felt slightly queasy at the thought of it, and before I left the house, I went to the bathroom and took a quick look at my ankle. The burn was healing; the blister had popped and now the skin was a little bit purple and wrinkled, but it was soft and painless when I touched it. I took out a book of matches from the mirrored cabinet and raised my leg up on the toilet seat. This time it was faster and easier; there was something almost mindless about it. I pressed the flame to my ankle in a different spot, closed my eyes, and counted to five.