The Way Life Should Be (25 page)

Of course he knows I’ll come.

After taking a shower
and throwing some clothes in a bag, I drive to the coffee shop. It’s seven fifteen, and customers cluster at the counter. Flynn moves back and forth between the cash register and the espresso machine. When he sees me he says, “Morning, sleepyhead. Nice of you to show up.”

“I’m sorry. My grandmother had a stroke,” I blurt out. “I need to go home.”

“Oh, blimey,” he says, holding his hand up, asking the customers to wait. “Nonna?”

I nod.

“She’s in the hospital?”

“Yeah.”

“Go, then. Go.”

“I’m going.”

“Want me to keep the dog for you?”

“Thanks—I guess I’ll take Sam. I don’t want him to think I’m abandoning him already.”

As I’m leaving, Flynn calls, “Make Nonna some
stracciatella.
Show her what you’ve learned.”

Four hours later, with Sam splayed across the backseat, lulled to sleep by the loud hum of the old motor, I drive over the green bridge that joins Maine to New Hampshire. It is December 21, nearly three months since I was last in this spot.

At the crest of the bridge, I feel a cleaving, an almost physical
sensation in my chest. Maine is past now; I have left it behind. What if I never return? What if these months were no more than a brief interlude, a respite, a regrouping? Maybe someday I’ll describe this as a journey I needed to take, the otherness of the experience revealing the importance of the things I really value. I’ll remember it with fondness, through the gauzy lens of partial recollection. The unheated shack, the characters I met—even Rich Saunders. “When I was in Maine,” I’ll say; I’ll refer to “that time when my life was falling apart and I escaped to Maine.” In time the entire experience will become illusory, a dream state.

One time long ago, when I needed to get away, I went to Maine.

Nonna is sitting up in bed
when I get to the hospital, awake but dazed. When I put my hand on hers, she looks at me with disinterest. Then she says, “They are giving me drugs.”

My father says, “They are not giving her drugs. Just a sedative to calm her down. She’s been berating the nurses all morning. They don’t understand what she’s saying, but believe me, they get the idea.”

She does seem out of it, but I don’t know how much of that is a result of the stroke. A ministroke, my father said, but she looks very different from the last time I saw her. Her skin is waxy yellow and deeply creased, her mouth a violet slash. Her arms, naked as plucked chicken skin, poke out of the loose blue hospital gown. She clutches the sheet with bony talons.

“She doesn’t like it here much. Do you, Annalisa?” Sharon says in a loud, artificially chipper voice.

Nonna fixes a beady eye on her.
“Cafona,”
she mutters under her breath. It is a harsh word, meaning ignorant or low class, and though I know there’s no love lost between them, Nonna’s use of the word shocks me.

I try to imagine how it must feel to be treated like a relic, a bother, reliant on the condescending kindness of the strong-willed wife of your weak-willed son. What an indignity to be dependent in this way, so old that death seems inevitable, natural; everyone is waiting for you to breathe your last. How has it come to this—to a hospital room in northern New Jersey, to such an abbreviated family that the burden of caring for you rests on the narrow shoulders of this one man?

She should have had half a dozen children, my grandmother, daughters to take care of her.

And my father—what is he thinking? Does he harbor old resentments toward her for placing her aspirations squarely on his shoulders? If only he had a sibling to share the burden! He did his part; he took his mother in, though his new wife wrinkled her nose when she woke in the morning, sniffed, “Is that—cabbage?” and pulled her robe around her in disgust. And who could really blame her? Go on a lunch date; end up living with someone else’s mother. What kind of deal is that?

But surely my father also remembers what it was like when he was small, clutching his mother’s hand as they crossed the street to visit the fish market, the iridescent shimmer of sardines swimming in tubs of water. How his mother would look over his shoulder as he studied English from his first-grade primer, at the kitchen table, learning to read the words at the same time he did. How he would stand beside her at the counter as she wielded the pastry bag, filling the cannoli shells, cooling on the counter, with creamy ricotta. At the narrow neighborhood market, she let him press the tomatoes to test ripeness, taste a leaf of peppery arugula. His father would come home from work and inhale deeply in the front hall, trying to guess what was for dinner, making a game of it. And how could my father forget the look on his mother’s face when he graduated from high school
and then Rutgers, when he began to make a living, not with his hands but with his head?

And then there are things I suppose he doesn’t want to think about—how he has been embarrassed by, exasperated with, this obstinate woman, how his background seemed to him unrefined. Having weeded those traits out of his own personality, he goes about his daily life unburdened by cultural identity. But when he sleeps at night, when he dreams, I wonder if he dreams about the two languages of his childhood, the wistful longings of his immigrant parents, the earth and sky of a village in Italy he knows only through stories his mother has told.

“How is she?”
Paul asks when I reach him on his cell phone. “I wanted to leave work early to come out there, but I couldn’t get away.”

“Umm,” I say. “Well, she’s alive. Maybe you can make it tomorrow.”

“Ahhh—actually, tomorrow’s no good. I could try on the weekend—but Kim is running the Kwanzaa-Hanukkah-Christmas pageant at the preschool, and I promised I’d be in charge of the basket raffle. I still haven’t gotten donations from a bunch of merchants in town, which reminds me—”

He sounds tense and harried, and I want to empathize, but instead I snap, “Jesus Christ, Paul! We’re talking about
Nonna.
She had a
stroke.
I’m sure you’re unbelievably busy, but this
really actually
matters.”

“Look, Angela,” he says stiffly. “You have no fucking idea what my life is like. While you’ve been flaking off to Maine, I’ve been riding Metro North every day and taking care of my family. And checking in on Dad and Nonna, I might add.”

“Okay, Paul.” I don’t want to get into this with him. “Nonna’s in the hospital.”

I hear him suck on his teeth, an old habit from childhood. “All right, fine,” he says. “I’ll try to cancel my afternoon tomorrow.”

“Do what you want,” I say.

The house is empty.
The kitchen is spotless. Without Nonna, the place feels sterile, like a long-term residency hotel. In my stepmother’s dressing room, I toss my bag in a corner. Dad and Sharon have gone out to “grab a bite” at a diner on Route 3 that I loved as a child but which has since been transformed into a chrome-and-glass monstrosity. I begged off and came back here on my own. I survey the room, still wallpapered in the garish floral print I chose in ninth grade. Draped across the couch and hanging on a coatrack are dresses and skirt suits shrouded in dry cleaner’s plastic. My old twin blanket, one I used in college, hangs folded over the back of a chair, just where I left it when I accordioned the sofa bed the day I left for Maine. On a small bookcase sits an assortment of my dog-eared paperbacks from high school and college—
The Catcher in the Rye, Chemistry 251, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Madwoman in the Attic
.

My blanket, my books, my wallpaper. Artifacts from a distant era.

Moving aside the whispery dry cleaner’s bags, I sit on the couch. Bounce a bit. I can feel the springs through the cheap cushions. I run my hand along the wool blanket, stroke the worn satin band with my finger. Though tired, I am not ready for sleep. I don’t really want to be in this house alone. Picking up the phone by the couch—Pepto-Bismol pink, another vestige of my teen years—I dial Lindsay’s number.

“It’s you? What are you doing home?” she says when she picks up, recognizing the number. “I thought it was your dad.”

“Nonna’s had a stroke,” I say. “She’s in the hospital.”

“Ohh,” she says. “I’m so sorry. How is she?”

“They don’t know yet.” Sitting there on the small couch, twirling the phone cord between my fingers, pink and curly as a pig’s tail, I feel my eyes fill with tears. I didn’t cry on the drive through six states, didn’t cry at the hospital, but now, hearing Lindsay’s voice, I feel myself being pulled to a place I’ve tried to avoid. This odd, fractured family—the center keeps shifting. When my grandmother dies, who will hold it all together? My mother is dead; my stepmother doesn’t care to learn or even understand our family’s ways. My brother and I barely speak. Where is the sense of continuity? In their village in Italy, my grandparents had parents and brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins and second cousins.
La famiglia.

I say as much to Lindsay, and she says, “You know you’re romanticizing the whole Italian-village thing. If it was so great over there, why was everybody so eager to leave?”

At the hospital the next day, my father and I set up camp, ignoring visiting hours. Sharon comes and goes. Late in the morning, Paul makes an appearance, arriving at Nonna’s bedside without taking off his overcoat. His three-button suit looks well-groomed, stylish. I, on the other hand, am dressed in paint-spattered jeans and a Rutgers sweatshirt I found in the closet, and have dark circles under my eyes.

His lips brush my cheek. “Hey, Angela,” he says casually, as if he saw me last week. He nods toward Nonna. “She’s looking well.”

As it happens, she is not looking well. She is sleeping so lightly that I can see her eyes flickering with movement under her closed lids. Her breath is a soft wheeze, her jaw slack. What Paul means is,
What were you so hysterical about? She’s not dying.

“You think so?” I ask.
Don’t minimize this to make yourself feel better.

My father comes into the room, and Paul nods in greeting. “What’s the prognosis, Dad?” he asks.
Let the men handle the medical facts.

My father dutifully reports the details. Nonna has had a transient ischemic attack, also known as TIA, or—he dumbed it down for me—ministroke. The blood supply to her brain was briefly interrupted; she has some facial paralysis, which the doctors hope is temporary. A TIA is a warning sign that a person is at risk for a more serious and debilitating stroke. The sooner Nonna can get out of bed and walk around, the better. “We just have to see how it goes,” he says.

“Sorry I couldn’t get here sooner. Work is—”

My father shakes his head, cutting him off. “Don’t even think about it. Glad you’re here.” It’s his mission in life to let Paul off the hook. He doesn’t want him to feel guilty about anything. Dad thinks that if he doesn’t put pressure on Paul to be a real part of the family, he will be more inclined to do so—a kind of reverse psychology that, as far as I’m concerned, is destined to fail.

Paul knows all of this, and as a result he’s making an effort to ingratiate himself for the short time he’s here. No point in being rude, and being pleasant will ease his conscience.

For the first time all day, my dad is animated. He is excited to talk to Paul, flattered by the attention. He flushes with pride. My son, the hotshot consultant! Now making small talk about the traffic on Route 80, now sharing a confidential tidbit about the inner dealings of a bankrupt company, now asking Dad’s opinion on titanium golf clubs. My father is amazed to have a son like this.

The two of them settle into chairs on either side of the big window, three feet from Nonna’s bed. My father leans toward
Paul eagerly. My brother, sitting back, crosses his leg over his knee crossbow-style, waggles his foot.

On the other side of Nonna’s bed, I sit watching her breathe. She is sleeping again; her chest heaving with each shallow breath, like a sick child’s. I have a sudden, panicked fear that she is stealing away in her sleep, that without our noticing she will be gone.

The contrast of Nonna’s visible decline with the antiseptic brightness of the hospital room is jarring. She doesn’t belong here. She hates bright lights, is bewildered by newness. She finds comfort in old clothes, darning and redarning socks, mending holes in her aprons until the fabric can’t hold the stitches. When my stepmother, in a frenzy of spring cleaning several years ago, filled several garbage bags with old clothing she found in bureaus throughout the house, Nonna pawed through them, confiscating wool sweaters that she later unraveled, saving the yarn for her own knitting projects: afghans and throws, sometimes a sweater. When she finishes a throw, she drapes it over the living room couch. When my stepmother comes home from work, she removes the throw and puts it in a drawer.

Nonna saves scraps in the refrigerator to combine with other scraps, endless small containers of leftovers. How it exasperates Sharon to open a drawer in the kitchen only to find it jammed with Nonna’s odds and ends: pieces of string, twist ties, rubber bands from the newspaper, yarn, outdated grocery-store coupons, free key chains bearing car-wash logos stamped in garish gold print. Ziploc bags, several times washed and dried, pooched like jellyfish over wooden spoons in the jar on the counter.
Waste not, want not.
The concept of disposability is anathema to Nonna. Yet here she is, in a place where everything is disposable. Including her.

She stirs and moans, and my brother leaps to his feet and reaches for her hand. My father closes his mouth midsentence and rises silently. Of course Paul isn’t here merely to chat; he came to see Nonna. It’s a little disappointing, all the same.

Paul stands, hands on hips, shirtsleeves rolled up like an attending physician. He looks at Nonna intently. Glances at the clock beside her bed. I read his mind: It would be great if she’d wake up long enough to register his presence, long enough for him to say a few words. Otherwise, damn it, he’ll have to do this all over again in a day or two.