More in Anger (29 page)

“I have to go back,” Viv told Frank.

“What about your sisters?”

“They won't.”

“Stella doesn't understand. She just wants her mother. She cries and cries and pushes me away.”

“I'm sorry, Frank, I really am. But it's too hard. It's going to be crazy hard enough just on my own.”

“Get your sisters to help.”

“I can't. They won't. Or they can't.”

Viv left the doctor's office the moment Pearl was ushered from the waiting room into the examining room. She closed the door quietly behind her. Her heart leapt with gleeful horror. She cantered down the hall, skipped the elevator and tore down the stairs, suddenly short of breath, her heart pounding as though her mother were after her. Wheezing for air, she threw open the door and escaped the building. Out of the corner of her eye she saw an ambulance pulling up. Feeling panic rising in her, she crouched down behind a half-ton and waited. The doctor would be jollying Pearl along—telling her how he wanted her to go for blood tests and had arranged
special
transportation for one
special
lady.

The doors of the building opened and Viv started to shake as she saw her mother slowly emerging, making her way not like a
person subdued or defeated or angry but like a queen being given her due. Two young male ambulance attendants held the doors. She acknowledged the service of her courtiers with a regal yet gracious nod to each. She embarked the ambulance, the attendants closed and secured the doors, and the ambulance drove away.

And that was it. She was gone.

Viv stayed crouched on the ground, her eyes closed, her head tucked under her folded arms. She could hear herself whimper. It was some minutes before she could get her legs under her, stand and locate her car in the lot. More minutes before she could get her legs to take her there, more minutes before she could get the key in the lock, the ignition, the car into reverse and then forward. She drove to her mother's house and she sat in the driveway thinking about cigarettes and alcohol and dope and how she didn't have any of them anymore and wished she had them all. Then she climbed through the kitchen window.

Her mother's absence was as huge and incomprehensible a thing as the absence of God, and as she stood there in her house she felt
bad
. Bad for her collusion in the trickery. Bad for breaking into her mother's house—she wasn't allowed here when her mother wasn't. By entering, she had wittingly violated the laws of the universe.

She turned off the coffee machine and dumped the thick black coffee into the sink. She threw the coffee mugs with the black stuff cooked to the bottom in the garbage. She put her mother's cereal bowl and spoon in the sink. She poured herself a glass of water and drank it. She slid open the kitchen windows. She opened the front door and the back. Welcomed the flow of cool, clean air.

And then she toured her mother's smelly, dirty house. In the living room the knitting bag with the needles sticking out the top sat beside her favourite chair. Her mother would miss that. Viv took four Scotch mints from the Wedgwood bowl on the coffee table beside the chair. Then four more. She put two in her mouth and the others in her pocket. She rattled the two against her teeth with her tongue as she walked down the hall. She turned the thermostat down to seventy. As she went into the bathroom, she crushed the mints with her molars. The sink and tub were scummy. Pearl's Max Factor compact sat by the sink with her can of VO5 hairspray and a tube of red lipstick. Her hairbrush, dirty, full of hair. Her toothbrush, toothpaste. She would want those too. Tiles hung loose above the tub and behind the grubby towels. Around the light switch the silver and green bamboo wallpaper was peeling. Viv pulled a few strips and turned the light off.

Her mother's bed was as nicely made as it had been every day Viv could remember, likely every day of her life, the bedspread smooth, the piping following the edge of the mattress, the gathered skirt falling evenly to the floor, the pillows balanced and even in height, the crease beneath them straight and deep, and no pillow slip or sheet end peeking out anywhere. The heavy floor-length curtains that matched the bedspread—both deep blue and turquoise—drawn open wide to “welcome the day.” Every surface tidy, dusty, dirty.

From the doorway of the spare bedroom she glanced at the pictures of Amy, at the unmade bed, at her own book of Cheever stories on the bedside table, her suitcase on the floor,
open, her red, orange and yellow underwear falling over the edge, her black jeans in a heap, her socks tossed in a display of carelessness she never practised at home. A little stuffed toy dog of Stella's she had brought for company. The room smelled faintly of herself, and she liked that.

In her mother's study, on her desk, she found two wobbly handwritten drafts of a letter, with a third draft started in the typewriter. The letter, addressed to My Daughters, accused them all of interfering in her affairs. They had put their own mother (this underlined) in such financial straits that she barely had enough to eat. If the whole useless bunch of them didn't straighten up at once (this too underlined) she was going to hire a lawyer to take care of the lot of them at once.

The hospital was badly overcrowded, and Viv couldn't find her mother at first. Was she really here, or had she escaped to return home? An orderly pointed towards what appeared to be a storage room, with its door slightly ajar. Viv made her way past all the people waiting and pushed the door open and went in. There she was. In a wheelchair. Facing a wall of shelves, facing case lots of paper towels and soap, as though she'd been wheeled in straight ahead and then abandoned.

Viv looked at the back of her mother's head above the back of the wheelchair. She almost spoke, but she didn't. She didn't want to see her mother and she didn't want her mother to see her. She would have to refuse to help her. Viv didn't want to struggle
with compassion; she wanted to run. Quietly, she put the bag of her mother's things down inside the door and then she turned around and left.

Back at home, Stella leapt into her arms. “I am so glad to see you, Bella Stella,” Viv said, and Stella laughed. As she tucked her in that night, Stella took hold of her mother's braid and pulled the elastic off the end. Freed, the braid began to unplait. Viv took hold higher up and shook it like a snake. “See?” she said. “See how it comes all the way undone?”

The night before Pearl died, she summoned her eldest daughter Ruby to the care home, and reluctantly, but with Ativan, Ruby went. They sat together on the edge of the bed looking through Pearl's jewellery. Though very little of it was of much value, the brooches and bracelets and earrings and necklaces all still mattered very much to Pearl, and Ruby said it took forever because she paused as she held each piece. She said barely a word that night, Ruby said, but she handled each and every piece of her jewellery before choosing the necklaces she wanted to wear, placing the others back in the blue leather box and closing its clasp. Then she said with uncharacteristic niceness, “Thank you for bringing me my jewellery.” Ruby said it was as though Pearl's displeasure with everything and everybody in the world had evaporated, and there was no tension at all in the air. “I know,” Ruby said. “I know, it sounds impossible. But honest to God, we sat together calmly, even companionably.” Ruby's words were
followed by another long pause, then a half laugh, a mixture of sorrow and derision. “Well, not exactly companionably. This
is
Mum.” And the next day, right after lunch, Pearl fell out of her wheelchair and died.

When Viv entered the viewing lounge, the first thing she saw was her mother's sharp nose sticking up like a small mountain peak over the edge of the cardboard cremation casket. Laurel came up beside her from behind, and when she too saw the nose sticking up they started giggling. Ruby and Amy were well behind them, hanging back by the door, silent and reluctant. But finally the four of them were standing in a row, eldest to youngest, beside all that remained of their mother.

The morticians had washed and combed Pearl's hair and it lay short and straight and grey against her skull. The sisters glanced at each other. How particular their mother had been about her appearance, especially her hair. She wouldn't have been caught dead, ha ha, in how it looked now. It had until near the end always been curled and coiffed or about to be curled and coiffed, its finishing touch that chemical halo of VO5. They'd never seen it, never seen her, like this.

Pearl's clothes were as dreadful as her hair. Purple Fortrel trousers and a blue and grey paisley rayon shirt that was far too big and buttoned incorrectly up the front. White cotton sports socks. Her own clothes had been wool, linen, silk. Never would she have chosen such things as she had on. The clothes came
from the care home, Ruby whispered. They put on whatever was handy.

Viv was the only one who kissed Pearl, though Laurel, making an odd keening sound, lifted Pearl's shirt and put her hand underneath and touched Pearl's stomach. Ruby, solemn and silent, rebuttoned the shirt Pearl was wearing so that it was right. Amy didn't touch Pearl at all.

Viv couldn't have said later why she decided to kiss her. It certainly wasn't out of love, and she hadn't kissed her for years. Getting close enough to offer a semblance of a hug had repelled her, and it was usually all she could do to make her body go forward to meet hers. Each time it had felt like she was going to slaughter. Maybe she kissed her because if ever in the next million years she wanted to kiss her one last time, it was now or never. She wanted no more regret. Pearl was cold, of course, since her body had been refrigerated, and against Viv's lips her expressionless face, her skull and her skin felt like icy cold concrete covered with rubber. When Viv stepped away, she felt warm air move around her, she felt her own self to be especially soft, and warm, and alive. Immediately she wanted to wipe her mouth again and again. She wanted to wipe death, and her mother, from her mouth, but they wouldn't come off.

Back in the anteroom with her sisters, she felt relief wash over her, as though together they had survived a harrowing ordeal. This was their final visit with their mother; she would go to the crematorium alone, so after this they wouldn't have to see her again for the rest of their lives. The rest of their lives! Hurrah! It was
over
. Viv felt something like joy rise in her. She eyed them all in the big gold-framed mirror. Did they all look different now?
Liberated? “Here we are, Mum,” Viv said, waving to their reflection. “Your useless wretches, bidding you adieu.”

But it wasn't over. They were out the door and Amy and Laurel were lighting smokes when Ruby opened her purse to get out her car keys and discovered the necklaces that Pearl had been wearing when she died. Ruby apologized: she had forgotten about them. She had had this idea, she explained, that Pearl might like to wear them as she went for her cremation.

“Who cares what Mum might like?” said Viv. “And anyway, she's dead.” But no one answered. Why Ruby should care after the way they had been treated all their lives was beyond her, and she said so. But Ruby pulled the necklaces out of her purse in a jumble, sorted them out and hung them off the flat of her open palm. She held them out to her sisters. One was a string of yellow shells, one of brown pods, one of reddish-brown South American seeds, and one of pink, irregular freshwater pearls. Laurel and Amy refused to help. “You go,” they said. “We have to finish our smokes.”