Delicious Foods (33 page)

Next thing I knew, I was regaining consciousness in a bright green room with a tube in my arm and another in my nose. I heard machines behind my temples, buzzing and chiming. A nurse poured water into a plastic tumbler and asked me if I wanted a glass of water. I nodded, or tried to nod, anyway. As she lifted the glass to my lips, it occurred to me that my life had just gone into overtime.

E
ddie heard thirdhand about his mother’s heart attack after a friend from her program found Bethella’s number and called her. Despite Darlene’s six months of sobriety, and her frequent pleas, through Eddie, for amnesty, Bethella still refused to speak to her sister, but she passed the information on to Eddie, who decided to visit. It wasn’t that his newly expanded hardware store had begun to make a profit and left him feeling flush enough to spring for a plane ticket, it was that the news had given him a number of unnerving premonitions: that his mother might not survive, that she might not
want
to survive, and that she might die alone. Although he had only the name of the hospital to go on, and though his one phone call to her room had gone unanswered, he flew to Shreveport anyway.

He found his mother sharing a room with a high-school girl also recovering from heart surgery—an athlete, by the looks of the sports-themed decorations around her bed, which sat on the window side of the room, where hazy brightness spilled in through the vertical blinds. The girl or her family had taped greeting cards all over her headboard and pinned many more to the wall; arranged a line of plants on the windowsill, their pots wrapped in colorful foil; left shiny gift bags littering the floor, the chair, the food tray. Above the bed, a banner told her
GET WELL MINDY
in metallic block letters.

The corner-store daffodils Eddie had brought, their silky white petals supporting orange cups, seemed clownish by comparison. On Darlene’s side of the room, the bluish curtain remained half closed, blocking most of the small amount of light her area received, and the only objects in her vicinity were a glass of water on the nightstand and a phone. She had an oxygen tube under her nose, and the monitor beside the bed whirred quietly.

The differences between the two sides of the room suggested to Eddie that his mother had tried, in her usual fashion, to tough it out by herself, doing it her own way without admitting how often her own way went express to Failure. At this late date, it would seem cruel and pointless to harp on her self-destructive patterns; by now even to her they must have felt as obvious as a freight train barreling toward a car stalled on the train tracks. The bare room meant either that Darlene had called no one or that she had, but no one cared. Eddie wasn’t sure which was the sadder scenario.

Only when he stepped across the threshold, though, did he feel as if he’d made a mistake. That surprised him, since he’d had so much time to consider his options, his motives, and the possible reactions of his mother.

Her initial response did nothing to reverse his self-consciousness. She lay back in bed, absorbed in a rerun of
Family Feud
on the wall-mounted television, and, when she recognized that Eddie had entered the room, she raised herself slightly with the automatic button by her side and shimmied into an upright position, stiffening her spine. Her body language suggested puzzlement rather than joy.

She glanced at him from beneath lowered eyebrows and said, You couldn’t call?

He stopped at her bedside and laid the flowers on a chair. He rested his metal prostheses against the bars at the foot of the bed, making a noise like a service bell. For an instant, the festive atmosphere on Mindy’s side of the room caught his eye again. Mindy herself lay on her left side, face toward the window in a patch of sun, peroxide-blond hair brilliantly glistening in the light, snoring like the engine of a small car. His eyes returned to his mother and he focused on the distance between his mechanical pincers and the bare soles of her feet. He could already feel himself becoming angry at the thought that she might turn him away after he had made so much effort to see her, but the glance at the other side of the room had reminded him of Darlene’s loneliness, and he thought that she might not decide to send him away for failing to announce his arrival if he could find a way to cure that loneliness without calling any attention to it.

I did, he told her, choosing his words carefully, but no one picked up the phone.

Oh, she said. Well, then. I’m glad you’re here, but I didn’t want anybody to see me this way. This is not ideal. Without moving, she indicated with her attitude that it would be okay for him to approach and sit beside her, and that while she might not approve of him interrupting the television, which had switched to
Jeopardy!,
they might begin to have an elementary conversation.

Eddie edged his way to the chair by the side of the bed and sat in it at what he determined was a comfortable distance. I heard what happened, he said. You’re feeling better. He realized that he’d sat on the flowers, and he raised himself on his haunches enough to move them to the nightstand. A few of the blooms were still intact.

She laughed, and through her laughter asked him not to make her laugh because laughing hurt. If I started feeling worse, I would’ve died, Eddie. The statement did not strike Eddie as humorous but bitterly true. He felt guilty that he’d destroyed the daffodils. He watched the television and said nothing for a few moments to allow the moment to pass.

Your smile’s looking good! he told her.

She brightened up and demonstrated her restored teeth. Why, thank you! she said. You came all the way from Minnesota. Where’s the family?

They stayed back. It seemed like the best idea.

Because why? Darlene asked. Are you ashamed to—

No, no. Expenses and everything. Ruth’s working, Nat has preschool.

Nat, she said, and when she said the name it sounded to Eddie like she had addressed her husband rather than his son.

She asked when he would let her see young Nat, and while Eddie should’ve expected to hear the question, he found himself caught off guard a second time.

Obviously, she said, I’m not going to be around forever. I might not be around next week. We’re letting too much time go by.

Eddie struggled to find a proper response without lying and once more resorted to silence. There was no way he could try to set guidelines at that point—to do so seemed both premature and overdue, it would be neither useful nor logical. Maybe she had meant to put him on the spot. He could feel it now between them more clearly than ever before in life, an ominous sense of time as an enormous set of gears, each generation interlocking with the ones on either side, all of them forced to react by turning each other in opposite directions.

Occasionally speaking over Alex Trebek, they embarked on a rudimentary, halting conversation about the most recent months of their lives. Darlene emphasized her significant time living clean and sober and incorporated many familiar homilies that she credited with getting her through the roughest parts of her recovery and her new life. Fake it till you make it, she said. One day at a time. She returned so frequently to the principles of the program, in practically the same way she had hewn to the precepts of the book, that Eddie couldn’t help doubting her. Everything she said reminded him of the book, which made him remember the urine-soaked barracks and the sweltering fields of Delicious Foods. Surely she knew the truth, which was that only time could prove she had conquered all of the terrible patterns, the vicious cycles whose pains he could still feel in his phantom fingers.

Remember Sirius B? Darlene suddenly asked.

Not very well, Eddie said. But you were involved with him, weren’t you?

I still daydream about him sometimes, she said.

It seemed like a girlish confession, a chamber of her personality that his mother rarely opened.

He was a very interesting guy, Eddie offered. From what I hear, he’s doing well in the music business.

I did a lot of daydreaming back at Delicious, Darlene said. You had to. Especially in the fields on those details. She didn’t turn away from the TV.

Eddie allowed her to define what she’d done as daydreaming, choosing not to argue.
Daydreaming,
he thought.
If only.

Like everybody, she said, she figured out a way to keep her attention focused just enough to accomplish whatever task she’d been assigned, so that her mind could travel in any direction it pleased even if they would not allow her body to follow. She told Eddie that she often found herself disappearing to a strange episode she had shared with Sirius one diamond-clear evening. The sun had tipped over the horizon and turned the land in the west into a velvet silhouette, while off to the east, the sky had become a navy blue felt blanket shot through with pinholes, all of them mysterious—was each one a distant home? A streetlamp? A high, oblivious airplane? Some celestial event?

We knew without having to be told, Darlene said, that we would have to work overtime, into the night. The managers never turned on the work lights until the very last possible moment. How’s main purpose in life was to make sure Delicious never went over budget.

Eddie laughed in agreement and said he remembered that.

His mother sought out his hand and looked down when she found his prosthesis instead. An unspoken shame for having momentarily forgotten the past seemed to radiate from her; she skipped over the apparatus, and her fingers made gentle contact with the skin of Eddie’s forearm.

It’s okay, he said.
Forgiveness never ends,
he thought to himself.
Either it’s a bottomless cup or it’s nothing. Black—no milk, no sugar.
Come up next month, Ma. I’ll take care of the airfare. Immediately he chided himself for having made this offer before clearing it with Ruth.

Really? she said.

Maybe I’ll make dinner for you and Ruth and Nat, maybe Bethella will come by.

Let’s not go too fast! she exclaimed at Bethella’s name.

Darlene locked eyes with her son. Eddie tried not to smile or cry. The longer they held this look, the more it expanded, seeming to contain everything—the events of their past as well as the consequent emotions: pain, joy, betrayal, estrangement, love, hate. Then the moment blew like an overloaded fuse.

She spent a moment trying to remember the subject of their conversation, then said, Sirius! So me and Sirius, we turned into a couple of black blobs out there that night, squatting to pick strawberries, turning invisible.

The moon hadn’t come up yet. In that sable darkness they found an advantage. Sirius knelt in the dirt behind her to rest, an act that, had How seen it, would’ve earned him a severe reprimand. He had stopped picking anything in favor of shaking the vines in order to make a noise that sounded like work. Darlene stopped too and raised her hand to wipe her brow and take a whiff of the strawberry residue that coated her fingertips, the only pleasure the job had to offer, and a dubious one at that, given the stickiness that accompanied it. In the midst of his rustling, Sirius quietly begged her to join him, and she inched her way in his direction, still squatting, duck-style. By this time, the dusk glowed a striking pink stroke against the black of the distance, and stars revealed themselves like champagne bubbles along the inside of a vast fluted glass. When she arrived at his side, placing her hand on his sweaty back through the cutout sleeve of his shirt, he pointed out various constellations, the centaurs and scorpions in the sky that she had never quite believed in.

He explained to her again the concept of light-years: light traveled six trillion miles in one of our years. Somehow that sounded slow to her. She found it disturbing and difficult to fathom when he repeated that the starlight they saw that night had really happened hundreds of years in the past and only reached their eyes that day. It offended her that the past could intrude so literally on the present yet never return. It made her think of everything in her own past that had brought her to Delicious and that she wanted to reverse, and how the light from the stars had come from long before the time she had been with her son, even from before the time when Nat had been alive. Only then could she faintly accept the romance of it; of human beings, all by themselves on a wet rock in an outpost of a universe whose size they couldn’t comprehend, staring into the heavens to make primitive pictures in the air based on lights that might not even exist anymore. And one of these days all of it would disappear, at least the way Sirius described it: space would collapse, the planet would get torn apart by a comet, the sun would fry the solar system with a supernova, some catastrophe would obliterate human history and civilization. We’ll be lucky, he said, if our bones become somebody else’s fossils.

Darlene absorbed all of this information from him but could find no hope in it whatsoever. Why, she asked, if all these small things we do, all this work that gets dumped on us day after day, if all our love and our attachments mean absolutely nothing and everything will eventually get incinerated, why do we bother to do anything? Is there any reason to keep on living? Is that why it’s better to smoke our lives away, why oblivion and death seem to call to us continually, like they’re summoning us home? How do we do it? How do we go on?

Before Sirius could respond, How turned on the lights, a pair of those bright white spotlights mounted on stands in clusters of six, and unleashed the type of dazzling illumination you might normally find on a Little League field in a suburban town. The two of them must have felt electrocuted. They froze for an instant, then their limbs unclenched, and as if falling out of the cosmos, they reset themselves to the task of foraging in the low plants and vines and dirt to find unbruised, pristine specimens and gently place each berry into one of the small boxes they carried for that purpose.

So I never got to hear his answer to the question, Darlene said. I found my way, but I wanted to know what he thought.

I reckon I heard the answer, Eddie said, and he began to relate how during Sextus’s trial, he and Sirius had gone with Michelle and a couple of people on the prosecution team—a lawyer and a young clerk—to a diner a few blocks down the road, the kind that looks like an Airstream trailer, wrapped in aluminum that’s been polished and faceted into diamond shapes, flooded inside with that pleasantly unpleasant odor of many years of hot bacon grease. Somewhere in the course of a freewheeling conversation, loosened by the sense that the team no longer had a chance of losing the case and by the solid beams of sun chopping through the space, the clerk turned to Sirius and questioned him about his escape the way someone young and brash would.