don’t think they had any. You forget my high school was in a small farm town. Only twenty-five in my graduating class. Besides, I never would have had time to go back. We drove past the building once when we visited your grandmother years ago. Or I guess we drove past the spot where the building once was. Torn down, now a bank or something. It’ll be interesting, though, for you to go tomorrow. There is one thing I’d like to know. Was it you or your sister who put the bullet hole in the Buick?”
“Elizabeth,” you say. “She didn’t put it there, I mean, the car apparently got hit one of those times she drove into the city with her friends to go clubbing.”
“I figured as much,” Mom says.
“You’re not upset?”
“That was a long time ago, water under the bride and all.”
You note her malapropism, a habit which over the years you’ve found more and more endearing. Your favorite is when she says Variety is the price of life.
“I’ll leave you to it here,” she says. “I’ve got laundry and stuff to do downstairs before your sister and George arrive tomorrow for brunch.”
As soon as she leaves, you go digging into the desk for the photo of you and the harem—Julia, Lane, and Carmen. The Polaroid is a pseudo ménage à quatre—you are all fully clothed, wrapped up as in a game of Twister—but for some reason you don’t want your mother ever to see it.
Before you even get into the second drawer, you find a small notebook and some scraps of paper with your father’s handwriting. Some are dated within the last year.
You first found similar scraps of paper while you were home from college one summer. Rummaging around your bedroom, trying to find a t-shirt or sock or something, you came upon pages of legal pad paper that had been shoved, hastily it appeared, underneath a stack of books. The scribblings were so bizarre that some of the passages stuck in your mind verbatim, and then one day they seemed to vanish from your mind without you’re noticing they’d vanished. But now, here are what look to be fairly new scribblings:
B put herself and others permanently in my head. Invasion of privacy is one huge issue. This is what I have to put up with.
Martha was a friend 7 times. Never married with her. No sex together. Martha was in Africa 7 times. And had to carry water 8 miles each morning. Had to live on the cusp of starvation. She had a son, same as now. She always tried to befriend those who came for help.
5 times I was on Atlantis.
Billy Bob Thorton - joined 12/9/06 Ozzie Osborn - joined Mike Nichols - ? Angelina Jolia Unga = “boiling over” Mr. Magic = me
Had 7 children, 3 stillborn (wife ate too much beef)
B had me clubbed to almost death 3 times this morning (12/13/06). And also whipped 80 lashes in my sleep. I was groggy again. But I broke B’s noise with a mind bolt of energy.
I have been black 6 times.
Your stomach sinks and a pang of unidentifiable emotion runs the length of you. You’d assumed that he had stopped writing crazy notes. Your mother hasn’t mentioned any others since those you showed her years ago. Your head pounds with thought in every direction. You sink to the floor in a daze.
You find her ironing in the basement. “Look at these,” you say, handing her the papers.
“Yes,” Mom says, “I’ve seen others like that.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know.”
“Recently?”
“I don’t know,” she says, “I used to find them among the magazines in the copper tub near the fireplace. They were redundant so I stopped noticing them.”
They may be redundant but they may also be sign of a psychological break. Or at least that’s what you imagine, based mainly on nine months of reruns of crime scene TV shows; your attempt to beat insomnia. So while your mother continues to iron unperturbed, you go searching the house for more notes. An hour of Easter-egg hunting yields two small memo notebooks and an assortment of scribbled-on receipts, used envelopes, and post-it notes. You wonder if these coincide with the wine drinking.
When you display the evidence to your mother, she seems only a little concerned. “What about the voices?” you ask.
“I don’t know,” she says, cleaning the downstairs toilet. “Maybe he hears a few.”
It’s not the voices that trouble you exactly; it’s what they might tell him. You remind her of the time he tried to transfer money from their savings account to some quasi-religious organization in Montana. The plan only failed because he got one of the digits in the bank’s routing number wrong.
She acknowledges that the scraps could be a potential problem. You feel like you should do something.
“Whatever you do,” she says, “don’t take the papers with you. Put them back where you found them, so that he doesn’t know we’ve seen them.”
“Fine,” you say, “but I’m making copies.”
“If you want,” she says, wrapping the toilet brush in a plastic bag.
“Do you have any change?”
“Check my purse.”
It’s difficult finding a copy machine in the middle of the night, but finally at a convenience store attached to a gas station you manage to copy, at a quarter per page, twenty or thirty pages of material. You pull the car back into your parents’ driveway feeling better that you’ve done something. It’s almost one a.m. and you’re completely exhausted. At least you have the scribblings—you can analyze them later or take them to The Professor for his advice.
You open the front door and notice there’s still a light on in the kitchen. Mom is sitting at the table with a cup of tea. You sit down more out of guilt for not having visited home in so long than out of any desire to talk.
“How’s Owen taking it?”
You’re surprised it took this long for her to ask, though you thought she’d ask how you were taking it. You’d like to tell her fine or just dandy. No, you’d really like to tell her that when one has a young child, one moves through Kübler-Ross a little differently than others: Denial is fairly easy and lasts about five minutes; Anger seems to be a continual stage that comes in unpredictable waves; Bargaining doesn’t make any sense (how do you bargain with a dead woman?); and, Depression, though tempting, has to be skipped altogether, because if one doesn’t get out of bed, it’s not as if one’s toddler is going feed himself breakfast, pack a well-balanced snack, and then navigate morning traffic to half-day daycare. As for Acceptance, the alleged final stage, one is still not sure what that might be; acceptance of what—the cliché that death is a natural part of life? It was only too natural that one’s wife died because of a camouflaged tree nut. You want to tell your mother all of this. But it’s too late and you don’t have the energy for a drawn-out conversation. So after an extended meaningful pause, you say, “Honestly, Mom, I don’t think it really matters. Owen’s not even two, and soon enough he won’t remember her at all.”
“Certainly he’ll remember his mother.”
“What for?”
She stares at you blankly, or what you take to be blankly, and then the word itself blankly runs again and again through your head until finally she gets up from the table, turns off the kitchen light, and marches up the stairs to bed. You sit there for some time in the dark, with your head down on the table. As usual you contemplate suicide. As usual it seems like too much trouble.
3.
“Ma-ma!