They May Not Mean To, but They Do: A Novel (8 page)

Aaron was supposed to come home from the hospital soon, and Molly tried to talk to her mother about how she would manage once Molly went back to Los Angeles.

Freddie was gone already, back to her sleepy undergraduates. Her semester started a week earlier than Molly’s, and Molly envied her that roomful of hungover boys and girls, students forced to sit and listen. You could test students, grade them, fail them if necessary; you could tell what the correct answer was. Your mother was another story.

Molly tried, she really did. She ran through all the things her father could no longer do, all the things Joy would have to help him with, even writing them down on a large legal pad in broad black letters. Aaron could no longer stand up by himself. He couldn’t get himself into bed or out of bed or out of a chair or into a chair. He could not walk by himself, though he often tried, which meant he could not be left by himself for even a minute. Joy would have to dress him, and Joy would have to undress him.

“This is not news to me, Molly.”

He needed to be bathed, frequently. And dried. And powdered. He required ointments and unguents. He needed all the attention to pouches and adult diapers that Molly was so queasy about, as well as the rashes and sores they produced, and even so, the bed linens often had to be changed in the middle of the night.

“I can cope. I have
always
coped. Haven’t I? Admit it, Molly. Through everything.”

“Yes, you cope, but can’t you cope with some help? Just keeping him fed is exhausting.”

“I order in,” Joy said.

Molly had noticed that. In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, her father was given the remains of the same turkey meat loaf dinner from the coffee shop for days, interspersed with the remains of the roast turkey dinner and the turkey burger deluxe, for variety. Joy had tried to feed Molly endless teaspoon-size portions of turkey leftovers, too, but Molly had rebelled and insisted on cooking. Both her parents pronounced her chicken too spicy and her green beans undercooked, then turned rather loftily back to their scraps.

“Next thing I know you’ll be sending both of us off to assisted living,” Joy said to her now. “To a facility.”

“A locked ward.”

“In the meantime, I need you to fix the computer. I hate the computer.”

She said the words “the computer” with categorical disdain, the way someone might say “Tea Party.”

Molly felt the buzz of her phone and went into the bathroom so she could check the text without incurring her mother’s rage.

“Help,” said the text from Daniel. “Dad thinks I’m in the hospital.”

“You are,” she responded.

“He thinks I’m the patient.”

Daniel was waiting when she got to the cramped café ten minutes later. She swept in, looking harassed, windblown. She always looked harassed and windblown, he thought, even when she was reading a magazine on the sofa or sitting in a restaurant at dinner. Her clothes were always pressed and tucked in and perfectly, overly, coordinated; yet she always appeared to be weathering a great storm. Maybe it was the way she moved—big, jumpy gestures.

“Mom is going to have a nervous breakdown and die,” she said.

“Hello to you, too!” He stood up and kissed her. She rested her head on his shoulder for a moment, relaxed and soft. Then he felt her pull herself up. Back on duty.

“Those two are killing each other. What are you eating? I want a panino.”

He laughed. A panino, singular. She did like to be correct, Molly did. “I already had a sandwich at the hospital that was prepared in 1958,” he said. He ordered an espresso. “A good espresso place in our old neighborhood. Imagine that.”

“Imagine that. You sound like Daddy.”

Daddy. He liked it when she said that. It made everything seem softer, kinder than it was. “He’s in agony one minute, and then the next minute he forgets he was in agony. It’s like a backward curse. Or a Greek myth: Dad-alus.”

They talked about Coco and his kids for a few minutes. Ruby had turned twelve a couple of months before. Many of her friends were studying for bar and bat mitzvahs. She was not interested. Even the lure of a party and gifts did not entice her. Religions caused wars. Religion was mass hysteria. Like soccer fans, but worse. Cora, on the other hand, was already planning her party, five years to plan it, that ought to be enough, Daniel said, laughing. Then he remembered he should probably ask Molly about Freddie. “How’s Freddie?” Molly started to tell him how Freddie was, and he nodded, not listening. Molly said, “Are you even listening? You never listen, Daniel.” Molly always told him he didn’t listen, and it was true. How else did people get through the day? Daniel’s notion of a perfect afternoon was to sit in a garden in the warm sun with bees buzzing lazily around him, his eyes half closed, a battered Panama hat comfortably situated on his drooping head, like the scene in
The Godfather
with an ancient Marlon Brando. Daniel had no interest in being ancient just yet. He just didn’t like to rush. He gazed idly at the glass display case and wondered if the cookies were any good. He held his hand up to summon the waiter.

Molly thought, He moves like an old Chinese man on a hill doing tai chi, dignified in the dawn. His expression was serene, self-possessed. But Molly knew he was merely distracted, constantly distracted.

“Wake up,” she said. “What are we going to do, Daniel? About Them?”

He shook his head. What, indeed? “I do come up to the apartment every Saturday,” he said. “And I bring the girls, too, sometimes. We go to a museum first and then come for dinner. Mom never wants to come with us to any of the museums, though. She doesn’t like to leave Dad, although all he does is sleep in front of the TV. I’ve tried to get him to go in a taxi and then a wheelchair, but he never wants to. Neither of them is very cooperative. They would have such a good time, watching Ruby sketch—she loves Picasso.”

“She
would
love Picasso,” Molly said, laughing. “But walking around museums at this point…”

“Cora is so into the minerals at the Museum of Natural History. Not just the ones that look like jewels. I think she has a scientific bent…”

“Come on, Daniel. She’s eight. She likes rocks. Which I think is fantastic, I like rocks, too. But what are we going to do when they let Dad out of the hospital? Mommy can’t take care of him anymore.”

“I don’t want them to be old,” Daniel said.

“The alternative and all that…”

“Maybe.”

“We can’t put pillows over their faces.”

“No,” Daniel said. “We would miss them too much.”

11

Joy went to work the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. She was expected, and if she was honest with herself, she could not stand another day sitting in the hospital with Aaron.

The museum was in the process of moving to a new building that week. The little neighborhood museum devoted to preserving a small, vibrant, gritty slice of New York life, the life of pushcarts and sweatshops and vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley, was moving into a new building in a different part of town. It was going to be incorporated into a larger organization, to become a section of the City University system, where there would be more room, more money, more prestige. It was as if the drab middle-aged museum had snagged a rich dentist.

“Dr. Bergman! There you are.” The new director was a nervous, suspicious woman with a heart-shaped face instead of a heart, that’s what Joy had told Aaron, and he’d laughed. She usually introduced herself as Miss Georgia, as if she were a beauty pageant winner. “Out with the old, in with the new,” Miss Georgia was known to say. It was her mandate. It had to do with grants.

“Packed up and ready to go?” she said when she saw Joy. “The new year approaches. The movers wait for no man.”

Then, like a schoolmarm or a politician or the Wicked Witch of the West, she shook her finger in Joy’s face.

Joy, a little taken aback, recovered and jauntily waved her finger in Miss Georgia’s face in response.

By Wednesday, they were in the new building.

“It’s big and bulky and it’s cement, it’s sort of like being inside an inverted swimming pool,” she told Aaron. She smoothed his hospital gown. “There are no windows that I can see. The stairs were made by giants for giants. And inside, I couldn’t decide whether I was about to be overcome by claustrophobia or agoraphobia. Help! I wanted to say. I’m just an old lady looking for my cabinet of old tchotchkes.”

Her new department was called City Collections.

“Like a sanitation-truck company,” she said to Aaron.

She had arrived at the new building out of breath and a little confused. Her bags were heavy and she tilted noticeably to the left. Lopsided or not, she thought, here I come.

“But this is a closet,” she said when Miss Georgia showed Joy her new office.

“A storage room,” the director corrected her. “But it will do nicely. Look at all the … storage.”

The narrow, windowless room was lined by expensive-looking built-in file cabinets. There was also a table, very white and modern, and a rather worn gray chair on casters.

“But I do need a desk,” Joy said. “I mean, after all, a person needs a desk.”

“But that is your desk,” the director said, pointing to the table.

“But it has no drawers. There isn’t even a drawer for a pencil.”

“Perhaps you have a nice mug,” the director said, patting the table encouragingly. “For your pencil.”

“Do you think they’re trying to get rid of me?” Joy said to Aaron. “I don’t think they can fire me for being old, so they’ll just torment me, right? Until I leave of my own free will.”

She spooned some ice cream into his mouth.

“They’ll see how easy it is to get rid of me,” she said. “They’re in for a surprise, aren’t they, Aaron?”

*   *   *

Aaron was prescribed various painkillers that teenagers in shrinking Midwestern towns abused. But when asked what the pain was from, the doctors were as canny and cautious as politicians. Molly wanted to shake them.
Tell us what is wrong so we can fix it
, she wanted to say.
He is suffering. And I have to get back to L.A. to teach.
She bombarded the doctors with direct questions, but the doctors always managed not to answer directly. Aaron had bladder cancer—they would concede that much, but everyone already knew that much. Heart failure, colon cancer, bladder cancer, Alzheimer’s. Yes, yes, but what was causing this pain?

“Daddy wants a pastrami sandwich,” Joy said, coming out of Aaron’s hospital room. “Honey, did you hear me?”

Molly had just asked the resident how long her father had to live. The resident said he could die tomorrow. Or not. He could live for a year. Or not. Or more. Or not.

“New York pastrami!” the resident said. “Good sign. A man with an appetite.”

In fact, Aaron had eaten nothing but a spoonful of ice cream in days, and when Molly arrived with the sandwich, he said there was a disgusting smell in the room, waved his big hand at her, and made her take it away.

She took the pastrami sandwich, which she had gone all the way to Zabar’s to get, to the cafeteria and split it with her mother and brother.

“It shouldn’t go to waste,” Joy said.

“That doctor said Daddy could come home in a day or two,” Molly said.

Joy wagged her head noncommittally.

“So we have to think about that.”

“You do need some help, Mom,” Daniel said. “Maybe someone to live in. Just for a while.”

“Molly’s here.”

Molly said slowly, clearly, “‘Help’ as in ‘You can’t get good help these days,’ not help as in ‘My daughter is a great help.’”

“And Molly has to leave on Friday.”

“I’ll cope,” Joy said. “I always have.”

“And when you’re at work? Do you want Daddy crawling down Park Avenue with no pants on? He needs someone to watch him.”

Joy sensed that Molly was right, but she wondered if it was necessary for Molly to bark at her like that. It was certainly expeditious, that bark, for even when Molly was not right, people tended to listen to her. But not this time, Joy thought. “I’m not sending him to a home,” she said. “Period.”

“Maybe we can get a nurse’s aide to come in,” Daniel said.

“I don’t want those people in my house. A different person every day … strangers snooping around.”

“But it would be so ‘cosmopolitan,’” Molly said, her voice full of sarcasm.

“What are you, sixteen years old, Molly? Give me a break.”

Molly did not give her a break, how could she? “You have to hire someone, whatever it costs. What have you been saving for all these years? A rainy day? This is the rainy day.”

Daniel said, “If it’s the money—”

“Of course it’s the money.”

“—then we can help you out, right, Molly? I mean as long as Ruby gets into a good public high school and Cora gets into a charter school for middle school and…”

“Take from my children?” Joy made a disgusted, dismissive sound. “Out of the question.”

“Well, then you could always sell Upstate,” Daniel said.

A horrified silence.

Then, “Never.”

Joy had inherited the little house Upstate when her mother died. She had fought to keep it safe from … well, from Aaron. There was no other way to put it, though she had tried at the time. We’re putting it in a trust, she had declared. A trust in my name. To keep it safe from creditors, she’d said repeatedly. But they all knew what she meant. Safe from Aaron. The house sat on a hill above a stream in Columbia County, New York. Upstate, Joy’s mother used to say. We’re going Upstate this weekend. Upstate was where the noise and worry of the city disappeared and the stream gurgled, where the birds sang. Upstate was the fruit of her father’s labors, that’s what he used to say when he stood on the porch and looked out at the maple tree and the three birch trees and the weeping willow by the stream. It was also the fruit of his frugality, and finally of his generosity. He had worked so hard, supporting every stray uncle or aunt or cousin who wandered through his door, and there had been a mob of them. Then the Depression ended and he was a manager, and then the war ended and he was a vice president. Spend a dollar, save a dollar, he said. And one day he announced that he had a surprise, and they drove out of town and into the country to the white-shingled house. He had saved and he had invested. Upstate was his reward, a reward he left to his wife and she left to Joy.