Authors: Liz Murray
The other fear was that he was cheating on me with someone, maybe even with Sam. That suspicion was something I didn’t have any evidence of; it was just a feeling that sat in my stomach like a stone.
I was a worrywart, the one who was no fun. I watched Carlos’s behavior, kept track of his spending, and reminded him of the hundreds of dollars he wasted every day. I brought up the apartment, told him food was cheaper if we split things, and pointed out, to everyone’s great disappointment, that we didn’t need cabs—the train was $1.25. He guarded his bank receipts like gold from the mint, and told me he would start saving soon. In the meantime, I should relax, live large—after all, didn’t we deserve to live it up after all we’d been through? Why was I so serious all of a sudden? His kisses were rough little pecks that made my skin crawl.
Once in a while, at night while Carlos entertained everyone, I called Brick’s from the pay phone downstairs. Sometimes Ma was home, and sometimes Lisa told me she had checked into the hospital, her voice sounding mechanical, resentful. One time when Ma was home, she answered the phone and asked me when I was coming to bring more pillows, and then went on to tell me that the road was wide open; it was only a matter of driving and painting all four walls. Her voice, like some confused child, made my throat feel as if it were splintered with razors. I tried not to cry, but I knew from research I’d done in the Forty-second Street library that dementia was one of the final stages of AIDS. Lisa grabbed the phone.
“Lizzy,” she said, “I don’t know
what
you’re doing, but you might want to think of spending more time with Ma. You may think you have all the time in the world, but you don’t.” Her voice was furious, but there was no way to communicate my fear of seeing Ma so close to death. I got off the phone as quickly as I could.
Later that night, Carlos was hosting a reggae party, blasting his radio for the crowd and jumping on the bed—which got us kicked out. We moved to another motel, an ancient set of two-story buildings lined with balconies on a desolate road, crowned by a pink fluorescent light that read
VAN CORTLANDT MOTEL
. Our bathroom window faced the massive expanse of Van Cortlandt Park. Carlos commented that we could make all the noise we wanted to here. He brought the party with us, and I pleaded with him for an extra room so that I could sleep. When we separated, Fief’s cousin, a white girl named Denise who wore huge hoop earrings and snapped her gum at me, was holding on to Carlos’s arm. I carried some of Sam’s, Carlos’s, and my things into the next room.
I spotted the paper Carlos had written those real estate phone numbers on protruding from a bag of clothing. I requested an outside line from the front desk so that I could call the one he had circled.
“Hello?” a female voice answered. Her name was Katrina; she was a waitress at some pool hall and had no idea about any apartment for rent. Tears filled my eyes. I hung up on her as she asked again where I got her number.
“Shut up,” I said to the ceiling. “Just shut up!”
My sleep was dreamless that night, as I breathed in the stale cigarette smell of my very own empty room while my boyfriend, my best friends, and a bunch of strangers partied, drank, and smoked weed rooms away.
The next morning, Carlos and Sam stood at the foot of my bed. Carlos’s voice was what woke me.
“Hey shimmy Shamrock, you want to go get some breakfast?”
“Where is everyone?” I asked. By the bright sun, I could tell it was early morning, and I figured they couldn’t have slept yet.
“Gone,” he said. “Eighty-sixed about an hour ago.”
Sam rubbed her stomach and let out an exaggerated wail.
“Ugh, sooo hungry,” she said, casting her thin arm over her forehead. “Fooood.”
At that moment I had to make a choice. I could confront Carlos about the phone numbers and take the opportunity to address the way he’d been acting, or I could drop it and go with the moment. I looked at Carlos, and for a second he became as much a stranger as the day I first met him—mysterious, slippery. But when he smiled, he somehow reversed it and became familiar all over again. My perception of him could change between blinks. How did he truly feel about me? If only he could be wonderful all the time and not send me so deep inside myself for answers that I didn’t have.
Sitting there, I decided to drop it. I ignored my anger and went with the flow. Anything else would have been pointless. What would the outcome of a confrontation be? If I got into a fight with Carlos, it’s not like I could go home to think about it. This was home;
they
were home. If I just acted like things were fine, maybe eventually they would be.
“Let’s go eat,” I said, shaking it all off.
Carlos pulled me up out of bed. I layered myself in three sweaters, pulled a knit cap over my head, borrowed a pair of Sam’s gloves that had the fingertips cut off, and followed them out. Downstairs, we discovered a tiny little café attached to the motel. It looked as if no one had mopped the floor or cleaned the windows in years, and certainly no one had painted the lime green walls in that long, but the grill shined like new and the air was flavored with the rich smell of bacon and eggs.
“Whatever you girls want,” Carlos said. “As usual.”
I ordered a toasted bagel with butter, and Sam did the same.
“Lots of butter,” she yelled at the grill guy, an ancient man with sparse whiskers. “I want a heart attack, serve it up,” she shouted in a deep voice, pounding on the counter. Several of the elderly people who populated the tables stopped their conversation to look her up and down. We took our food and exited. Carlos left a five on the counter and placed a cell phone call outside, standing with his light brown Timberland boots planted in the fresh foot of snow. Looking around, the area seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I thought I might have been in either the park or the café before. But when? How? As we walked back toward the stairs with our breakfast, I realized I was right.
“Duck,” Sam yelled. “Oh my God.” I looked around instead. Then I saw. Grandma, dressed in Ma’s old ankle-length bubble coat, clutching her tan purse in the crook of her arm, heading straight for the steps of the little café. Sam knew Grandma from her few visits to Brick’s apartment. She yanked me behind the corner of the motel building.
“Sam, oh my God,” I said, stumbling. “Her nursing home is right next door! She’ll call the cops and report me, I know it.” Carlos ran over to us. Without ducking, he threw his hood over his head, gathered the bottom of it with his fist and peeked out the top, exposing only his eyes.
“Who we hiding from?” he asked in a playfully girlish voice. “I’m so scared.”
“It’s my mother’s mother. She’ll report me as a runaway. She’ll call the cops. They’ll take me away to a home. Just be quiet.”
We peeked out from behind the wall, watching Grandma make her way through the snow. Her being there was like something from a dream, or an unconvincing scene in a bad movie. Without a thought in my mind, I let out a huge laugh at the ridiculousness of it. Sam placed her hand on my shoulder, squinting in Grandma’s direction.
“What’s wrong with her?” she asked. “She’s walking funny.”
Only then did I notice that Grandma wasn’t walking so much as inching her way down the street. More than once, she stopped to catch her breath and clutched her chest. As she drew close, I saw that her skin seemed pale, almost white. When she finally made it to the café, it took her several minutes to climb the few steps, while we looked on in silence. Once there, she flopped back onto one of the café’s hard plastic seats. None of the other patrons, who I assumed were also from the nursing home, acknowledged Grandma. She sat alone. Promptly, the grill guy brought a cup of tea to her and she passed him a folded bill, which she drew from her bag. It seemed a routine exchange.
Watching the whole thing, I became incredibly sad. It was a glimpse into her isolated world, the one she’d always complained of when I, Ma, or Lisa was stuck on the phone with her. Her words echoed back at me. “I’m lonely at the home. My granddaughters don’t come to see me. Even my rosary doesn’t cheer me up,” she’d always say. Now her loneliness played out in front of me like a somber, silent movie. It made real for me the impact of my neglect throughout the last few years.
“Weird,” Sam said. “It’s like we’re in
the Twilight Zone
.”
“I know,” I told her. “It’s so strange.” I looked behind me; Carlos was already upstairs. We turned to follow him, and made our way up the stairwell together. I wondered whether or not, in Grandma’s opinion, I would go to hell for all my sins: driving Ma crazy, abandoning her in her time of need, sleeping with Carlos. If you knew me better, Grandma, you wouldn’t want a visit from your granddaughter, at least not this one. I’m not the same little girl who spent Saturdays in the kitchen listening to your scripture. I’m reckless and I neglect everything, especially you.
Sam was speaking a jumble of words at me.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I said, isn’t that crazy, what that guy said to me when I left the store?”
“What?”
“
Happy Thanksgiving
. That’s crazy, I didn’t even realize. Kind of a downer, I guess, to think today is Thanksgiving,” she said.
“Oh,” I replied. “Wait, what? It’s Thanksgiving? Now? I mean, today?”
“Yeah, ain’t that somethin’? Who really cares anyway,” she said, pushing the motel room door open to reveal Carlos, who sat flipping channels on the old Zenith TV.
I did. I cared that it was Thanksgiving, and that I was so disconnected from the rest of the world I hadn’t even realized. I ate my bagel in a daze and watched the morning news curled up beside Carlos, half listening to him and Sam throw around jokes and conversation. I was busy thinking about how Lisa had begun Lehman College this term. It occurred to me that I never asked her how that was. It always amazed me that she could handle school, our family, and even boyfriends, without ever buckling under the pressure, without missing class. I was suddenly filled with panic at the realization that she was becoming yet another item on my list of growing regrets.
When Sam and Carlos eventually fell asleep, I lifted Carlos’s heavy arm up off my side, gathered change out of his army pants, not daring to touch his cell phone, pushed my feet into my boots, and slipped out the door to the pay phone. The cold stung my nose and ears, and the sound of Brick’s phone ringing quickened my heartbeat. I prayed for him not to pick up.
“Hello?” It was Lisa.
“Lisa, hi. Did I wake you?” My nervousness made me come off sounding chipper. I held my breath, waiting to see if she noticed.
“Lizzy?”
“Yeah. Hey. Did I wake you?”
“Um, not really. Where are you?” She spoke in a perplexed tone that implied my call was somehow inappropriate.
“Not that far away. I just wanted to see how you are.” I wished that I could tell her what had been happening, how unpredictable Carlos had turned out to be, where we were staying, how I had just seen Grandma in all her loneliness. But it wasn’t safe. I couldn’t trust that she wouldn’t tell Brick, who would tell Mr. Doumbia, and then I’d be taken into custody. I wouldn’t risk that.
“Oh. How am I?”
“Yeah, how’s Lehman?”
“Lehman?”
It was so annoying, the way she kept repeating everything I said in the form of a question and pausing uncomfortably long between her responses. I could feel her suspicion, her mistrust of my good intentions and her anger toward me. It made me aware of every word coming out of my mouth.
“Yes, I, uh, just wanted to call and see how you’re doing. I was wondering about school and about you . . . and about Ma.”
“Lizzy, Ma’s in the hospital. She’s sick. She’s been there for the last week and a half. She’s in the hospital all the time now. She was asking for you before, but I think you blew that. She’s been pretty out of it lately.”
A lump invaded my throat. Maybe it was the cold or the lack of a good night’s sleep that obscured my thinking, but for some reason, I hadn’t counted on the confrontation from Lisa. I thought we might talk like sisters, maybe catch up with each other. I fished for something to say.
“Okay. I know . . . do you want to meet up or something?”
“Well . . . why, do
you
want to meet?”
Since as far back as I could remember, I’d felt that Lisa’s responses toward me usually bordered on the brink of hostility. Years later, a therapist would explain that growing up with few resources had turned us into competitors—over food, over our parents’ love, over everything. At the moment, we were competing for who had the better handle on Ma’s illness, and we both knew she was winning.
“I don’t know, Lisa. I was thinking maybe we should see Ma.” There was another drawn-out pause.
“Well, I can make it around six. Get a pen and paper, I’ll give you her room number.”
“Lisa?”
“Yeah?”
“Happy Thanksgiving.”
“Yeah, Liz, you too. See you at six.”
“Hi. I’m looking for my mother, Jean Murray. She was transferred here from North Central last week. My sister told me I could find her on this floor.”
The nurse looked at her list.
“Let’s see . . . Jean Marie Murray. Okay, you’ll have to take a mask.”
“A mask? Why?” This was a first.
“All visitors for patients in quarantine need to wear a mask. And how old are you? You can’t be here if you’re not
at least
fifteen.” The nurse looked me over, seeing my confusion. I thought of the reading I’d done on Ma’s condition—something struck me as odd.
“Why would I need a mask if AIDS is not airborne?” I asked.
“It protects against TB,” she said. “Your mother could cough and expose you. It’s for protection.”
“What?”
“Tuberculosis, honey. It’s a lung infection; people with AIDS are vulnerable to it. Didn’t they make you do this before? Don’t tell me that someone let you up here without a mask before.”
My face went hot. I remembered Leonard and Ma during their weeklong binges in the kitchen on University Avenue. The whole time, he coughed incessantly, his lungs crackling with phlegm until he worked up a sweat that dripped from his face and his skin glowed bright pink. Daddy used to comment, “Boy, you’d think he’s ready to keel over and drop dead in there, from the sound of it.”