The New Yorker Stories (77 page)

When he opened them, Keller saw that his daughter was looking down at him, and nodding slowly, a tentative smile quivering like a parenthesis at the sides of her mouth, a parenthesis he thought might contain the information that, yes, once he had been able to reassure her easily, as she, in believing, had reassured him.

In appreciation, he attempted his best Jack Nicholson smile.

Find and Replace

T
rue story: my father died in a hospice on Christmas Day, while a clown dressed in big black boots and a beard was down the hall doing his clown-as-Santa act for the amusement of a man my father had befriended, who was dying of ALS. I wasn’t there; I was in Paris to report on how traveling art was being uncrated—a job I got through my cousin Jasper, who works for a New York City ad agency more enchanted with consultants than Julia Child is with chickens. For years, Jasper’s sending work my way has allowed me to keep going while I write the Great American I Won’t Say Its Name.

I’m superstitious. For example, I thought that even though my father was doing well, the minute I left the country he would die. Which he did.

On a globally warmed July day, I flew into Fort Myers and picked up a rental car and set off for my mother’s to observe (her terminology) the occasion of my father’s death, six months after the event. It was actually seven months later, but because I was in Toronto checking out sites for an HBO movie, and there was no way I could make it on June 25, my mother thought the most respectful thing to do would be to wait until the same day, one month later. I don’t ask my mother a lot of questions; when I can, I simply try to keep the peace by doing what she asks. As mothers go, she’s not demanding. Most requests are simple and have to do with her notions of propriety, which often center on the writing of notes. I have friends who are so worried about their parents that they see them every weekend, I have friends who phone home every day, friends who cut their parents’ lawn because no one can be found to do it. With my mother, it’s more a question of: Will I please send Mrs. Fawnes a condolence card because of her dog’s death, or, Will I be so kind as to call a florist near me in New York and ask for an arrangement to be delivered on the birthday of a friend of my mother’s, because ordering flowers when a person isn’t familiar with the florist can be a disastrous experience. I don’t buy flowers, even from Korean markets, but I asked around, and apparently the bouquet that arrived at the friend’s door was a great success.

My mother has a million friends. She keeps the greeting-card industry in business. She would probably send greetings on Groundhog Day, if the cards existed. Also, no one ever seems to disappear from her life (with the notable exception of my father). She still exchanges notes with a maid who cleaned her room at the Swift House Inn fifteen years ago—and my parents were only there for the weekend.

I know I should be grateful that she is such a friendly person. Many of my friends bemoan the fact that their parents get into altercations with everybody, or that they won’t socialize at all.

So: I flew from New York to Fort Myers, took the shuttle to the rental-car place, got in the car and was gratified that the air-conditioning started to blow the second I turned on the ignition, and leaned back, closed my eyes, and counted backward, in French, from thirty, in order to unwind before I began to drive. I then put on loud music, adjusted the bass, and set off, feeling around on the steering wheel to see if there was cruise control, because if I got one more ticket my insurance was going to be canceled. Or maybe I could get my mother to write a nice note pleading my case.

Anyway, all the preliminaries to my story are nothing but that: the almost inevitable five minutes of hard rain midway through the trip; the beautiful bridge; the damned trucks expelling herculean farts. I drove to Venice, singing along with Mick Jagger about beasts of burden. When I got to my mother’s street, which is, it seems, the only quarter-mile-long stretch of America watched directly by God, through the eyes of a Florida policeman in a radar-equipped car, I set the cruise control for twenty and coasted to her driveway.

Hot as it was, my mother was outside, sitting in a lawn chair flanked by pots of red geraniums. Seeing my mother always puts me into a state of confusion. Whenever I first see her, I become disoriented.

“Ann!” she said. “Oh, are you exhausted? Was the flight terrible?”

It’s the subtext that depresses me: the assumption that to arrive anywhere you have to pass through hell. In fact, you do. I had been on a USAir flight, seated in the last seat in the last row, and every time suitcases thudded into the baggage compartment my spine reverberated painfully. My traveling companions had been an obese woman with a squirming baby and her teenage son, whose ears she squeezed when he wouldn’t settle down, producing shrieks and enough flailing to topple my cup of apple juice. I just sat there silently, and I could feel that I was being too quiet and bringing everyone down.

My mother’s face was still quite pink. Shortly before my father’s death, after she had a little skin cancer removed from above her lip, she went to the dermatologist for microdermabrasion. She was wearing the requisite hat with a wide brim and Ari Onassis sunglasses. She had on her uniform: shorts covered with a flap, so that it looked as if she were wearing a skirt, and a T-shirt embellished with sequins. Today’s featured a lion with glittering black ears and, for all I knew, a correctly colored nose. Its eyes, which you might think would be sequins, were painted on. Blue.

“Love you,” I said, hugging her. I had learned not to answer her questions. “Were you sitting out here in the sun waiting for me?”

She had learned, as well, not to answer mine. “We can have lemonade,” she said. “Paul Newman. And that man’s marinara sauce—I never cook it myself anymore.”

The surprise came almost immediately, just after she pressed a pile of papers into my hands: thank-you notes from friends she wanted me to read; a letter she didn’t understand regarding a magazine subscription that was about to expire; an ad she’d gotten about a vacuum cleaner she wanted my advice about buying; two tickets to a Broadway play she’d bought ten years before that she and my father had never used (what was being asked of me?); and—most interesting, at the bottom of the pile—a letter from Drake Dreodadus, her neighbor, asking her to move in with him. “Go for the vacuum instead,” I said, trying to laugh it off.

“I’ve already made my response,” she said. “And you may be very surprised to know what I said.”

Drake Dreodadus had spoken at my father’s memorial service. Before that, I had met him only once, when he was going over my parents’ lawn with a metal detector. But no: as my mother reminded me, I’d had a conversation with him in the drugstore, one time when she and I stopped in to buy medicine for my father. He was a pharmacist.

“The only surprising thing would be if you’d responded in the affirmative,” I said.

“ ‘Responded in the affirmative!’ Listen to
you
.”

“Mom,” I said, “tell me this is not something you’d give a second of thought to.”

“Several
days
of thought,” she said. “I decided that it would be a good idea, because we’re very compatible.”

“Mom,” I said, “you’re joking, right?”

“You’ll like him when you get to know him,” she said.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “This is someone you hardly know—or am I being naive?”

“Oh, Ann, at my age you don’t necessarily want to know someone extremely well. You want to be compatible, but you can’t let yourself get all involved in the dramas that have already played out—all those accounts of everyone’s youth. You just want to be—you want to come to the point where you’re compatible.”

I was sitting in my father’s chair. The doilies on the armrests that slid around and drove him crazy were gone. I looked at the darker fabric, where they had been. Give me a sign, Dad, I was thinking, looking at the shiny fabric as if it were a crystal ball. I was clutching my glass, which was sweating. “Mom—you can’t be serious,” I said.

She winked.

“Mom—”

“I’m going to live in his house, which is on the street perpendicular to Palm Avenue. You know, one of the big houses they built at first, before the zoning people got after them and they put up these little cookie-cutter numbers.”

“You’re moving in with him?” I said, incredulous. “But you’ve got to keep this house. You are keeping it, aren’t you? If it doesn’t work out.”

“Your father thought he was a fine man,” she said. “They used to be in a Wednesday-night poker game, I guess you know. If your father had lived, Drake was going to teach him how to e-mail.”

“With a, with—you don’t have a computer,” I said stupidly.

“Oh, Ann, I wonder about you sometimes. As if your father and I couldn’t have driven to Circuit City, bought a computer—and he could have e-mailed you! He was excited about it.”

“Well, I don’t—” I seemed unable to finish any thought. I started again. “This could be a big mistake,” I said. “He only lives one block away. Is it really necessary to move in with him?”

“Was it necessary for you to live with Richard Klingham in Vermont?”

I had no idea what to say. I had been staring at her. I dropped my eyes a bit and saw the blue eyes of the lion. I dropped them to the floor. New rug. When had she bought a new rug? Before or after she made her plans?

“When did he ask you about this?” I said.

“About a week ago,” she said.

“He did this by mail? He just wrote you a note?”

“If we’d had a computer, he could have e-mailed!” she said.

“Mom, are you being entirely serious about this?” I said. “What, exactly—”

“What,
exactly
, what
one single thing
, what
absolutely
compelling reason did you have for living with Richard Klingham?”

“Why do you keep saying his last name?” I said.

“Most of the old ladies I know, their daughters would be delighted if their mothers remembered a boyfriend’s first name, let alone a last name,” she said. “Senile old biddies. Really. I get sick of them myself. I see why it drives the children crazy. But I don’t want to get off on that. I want to tell you that we’re going to live in his house for a while, but are thinking seriously of moving to Tucson. He’s very close to his son, who’s a builder there. They speak
every single day
on the phone,
and
they e-mail,” she said. She was never reproachful; I decided that she was just being emphatic.

Just a short time before, I had relaxed, counting
trois, deux, un
. Singing with Mick Jagger. Inching slowly toward my mother’s house.

“But this shouldn’t intrude on a day meant to respect the memory of your father,” she said, almost whispering. “I want you to know, though, and I really mean it: I feel that your father would be pleased that I’m compatible with Drake. I feel it deep in my heart.” She thumped the lion’s face. “He would give this his blessing, if he could,” she said.

“Is he around?” I said.

“Listen to you, disrespecting the memory of your father by joking about his not being among us!” she said. “That is in the poorest taste, Ann.”

I said, “I meant Drake.”

“Oh,” she said. “I see. Yes. Yes, he is. But right now he’s at a matinee. We thought that you and I should talk about this privately.”

“I assume he’ll be joining us for dinner tonight?”

“Actually, he’s meeting some old friends in Sarasota. A dinner that was set up before he knew you were coming. You know, it’s a wonderful testament to a person when they retain old friends. Drake has an active social life with old friends.”

“Well, it’s just perfect for him, then. He can have his social life, and you and he can be compatible.”

“You’ve got a sarcastic streak—you always had it,” my mother said. “You might ask yourself why you’ve had fallings-out with so many friends.”

“So this is an occasion to criticize me? I understand, by the way, that you were also criticizing me when you implied that you didn’t understand my relationship with Richard—or perhaps the reason I ended it? The reason I ended it was because he and an eighteen-year-old student of his became Scientologists and asked me if I wanted to come in the van with them to Santa Monica. He dropped his cat off at the animal shelter before they set out, so I guess I wasn’t the only one to get shafted.”

“Oh!” she said. “I didn’t know!”

“You didn’t know because I never told you.”

“Oh, was it
horrible
for you? Did you have any
idea
?”

She was right, of course: I had left too many friends behind. I told myself it was because I traveled so much, because my life was so chaotic. But, really, maybe I should have sent a few more cards myself. Also, maybe I should have picked up on Richard’s philandering. Everybody else in town knew.

“I thought we could have some Paul Newman’s and then maybe when we had dessert we could light those little devotional lights and have a moment’s silence, remembering your father.”

“Fine,” I said.