Women Drinking Benedictine (24 page)

“There's a reception area downstairs,” she said, adjusting the blankets around the foot of my mother's bed. “They serve coffee all afternoon.”

I took my time putting on my coat, and that's when I saw my mother's wet suit in the trash can. The sleek, black material was already dry, and I held it up for the nurse. “What's this doing here?” I asked. She shrugged and said she had no idea.

“This is her lucky suit,” I explained. “The one she's worn from the beginning. She'd never forgive you for throwing it out.” I tried several times to roll the suit into a ball, but the rubbery material, used to the shape of my mother's body, would not let me reduce its size. I spread it out on the nightstand, where the arms stretched over the corners of the thin wood dresser, the legs barely touching the floor.

The year after my father's death was hard for everyone. Prompted by a rush of Megan's phone calls, all warning that my mother was losing her mind, I went over to the house one Saturday afternoon in late September to have a talk with her. “Find out what she's doing,” Megan directed. “I think we should know what she's up to.”

“What makes you think she'll talk to me?”

“She probably won't,” Megan said. “But it's worth a try.” Megan believed my mother was going crazy with a grief that never seemed to lessen.

I found my mother sitting in the living room eating pretzel sticks and sipping red wine. The radio was turned up. The music prevented her from hearing the back door slam shut when I let myself in. I stood in the kitchen door and watched. She was involved in some sort of conversation with the love seat. She turned her head toward the armchair and smiled. Someone was sitting over there as well. She laughed and made a large circle with her free hand as if illustrating a point. Her lips were painted rose red, the shade she wore when she went out at night. She held the wineglass up to her lips and drew her tongue around the rim. It was a flirtatious movement, and even in her navy blue sweatsuit she looked sexy and pleased with her imaginary cocktail party.

I wasn't surprised to find my mother drinking so early in the morning. I didn't think it meant that Megan and Nina were right, that she was having some sort of nervous breakdown. But I saw as clearly as I ever had the depth of my mother's loneliness. I saw her desperation for company—her longing to be around interesting people—people who were interested in her life and the things she had to say. I had no idea who was at her party, though I hoped my father was there and that they were enjoying talking to each other again. If he wasn't there, then I hoped it was someone intelligent, someone sensitive, who would convince my mother that she was happy—that she had had and was still having a good life.

“I'm drinking because I'm frustrated,” she told me later that day even though I hadn't said anything about the wine.

“I'm bored. Just bored out of my skull,” she continued. “It's so frustrating to be so bored.” I told her she didn't have to account for her actions—that wasn't why I was there—though I suppose it was exactly why I was there.

We talked about what she might do besides drink. The world's largest flea market was at the Pontiac Silverdome that weekend. Mrs. Henshaw, the neighbor from across the street, had been trying to get my mother over for some authentic Icelandic cooking since her return from an around-the-world cruise.

“You should get involved in something,” I told her because, back then, I was sure that being with other people would keep her from being so lonely. I suggested volunteer work or maybe working in one of the several retail shops in the area. I imagined her making friends, having them over for tea, planting tulip bulbs when the ground was moist with spring rain.

“I feel like I'm living out the epilogue of my own life,” my mother told me. “I've had my husband. I've had my kids. There's nothing left for me to do.”

“You're not that old. It's ridiculous to talk this way.”

“I'm tired of looking backward,” she said. “Tired of remembering everything. But I can't see anything ahead. I don't see much changing in my future.” The wine filled her body with black shadows that I could not get rid of so easily.

“Winter's almost here,” I said. “And then it will be spring.” The day was gray, as it always is in Detroit in October. The trees had lost most of their leaves, their thin bare branches melted into the thick cloud cover. I searched for things I could promise her. “Little Barry will be walking soon. Think what a terror he's going to be once he starts getting around on his own.” Barry was Megan's youngest son, ten months old. My mother used to call him her dream child because he was so beautiful.

“Maybe,” my mother drifted away from the conversation.

She was staring out the window and nodding as if she were listening to me, though her thoughts were clearly somewhere else. She might have been thinking about her abandoned cocktail party. Outside two squirrels ran in circles around the thick pole holding the birdhouse. Their hyper, energetic behavior kept the birds away, but I suspected my mother threw birdseed on the ground specifically for the squirrels.

“I've already had my kids,” she said when she finally drifted back into the conversation.

“I know that,” I told her. “All I'm saying is that you have grandkids who love you. They're a part of your future.”

“I spent all those years raising my own kids. I don't think I want to do it again.”

“You don't have to do anything,” I said. “Megan's going to do all the work. She'll take the responsibility for her own kids. You can just sit back and enjoy them.”

“I don't think so,” she said, and I knew that she wasn't denying her grandchildren or their growing up. She was denying something else, something she wasn't articulating just yet. I poured more wine into each of our glasses, and she drifted back into her daydreams. I turned on the radio and started cleaning up the kitchen. I fried up two turkey sausages, and around noon we ate them with celery sticks and finished off the jug of wine. Sometime that afternoon we decided that a long walk around the neighborhood would lift our spirits.

“I wish I could play basketball,” she told me when we were halfway around the block.

“Women's basketball isn't that interesting,” I argued. “They can't dunk.” I ran ahead, pretending I was making my way down a basketball court toward the net, then jumped for my layup. The leaves on the sidewalk scattered when I landed.

“Then I wish I could be on the men's team,” my mother said. She had always been stubborn, but depression made her more so.

“You'd be awfully short.”

“Not all of them are as tall as they look.” She was wearing a kelly-green stocking cap that one of us had knitted for her in seventh-grade home economics class. The stitches were long and loose, the tiny ball hung halfway down her back.

“Some of them are seven feet tall.” I said, but I should have known better than to get into this kind of thing with her. She was much better than my father had predicted before he died.

“Spud Webb's only 5′ 6″.”

“Spud Webb sounds like a potato,” I told her. The street lamps flickered on. We were back home, but evening was still a half hour off, and we started around the block again.

“He plays for Atlanta,” she said. “Went to school at North Carolina State. But the shortest player in the NBA is only 5'3".”

“That's impossible,” I said. It was raining, but the day was warm—almost humid—and we had not bothered with umbrellas. “He'd be a midget out there with all those other guys.”

“Tyrone Muggsy Bogues,” she said and stopped walking while she collected her thoughts. “He's with the Hornets. Came from Wake Forest. Check it out if you don't believe me.”

She knew I wouldn't know where to begin to look up that kind of information.

“Well, those guys might be short, but they're young,” I reminded her, not because I didn't think she knew this, but because I wasn't sure how serious she was.

“I didn't say I could play pro basketball. I'm saying I wish I could play it.”

“I wish you could play it, too,” I told her. “Megan, Nina, and I could be the presidents of your fan club. We'd be there at all the home games holding up signs with Bible quotations no one would understand, screaming out your nickname when you stepped up to the foul line.” I sneezed and she handed me a tissue. It was a sign that I should either wipe my face or blow my nose. I did both and then, just as I had when I was a kid, handed her the soiled tissue, which she stuffed back in the deep front pocket of her raincoat.

Later that week, when I called to invite her out to dinner, she told me she couldn't go. She was busy.

“Doing what?” I asked.

“I'm going to learn to kayak,” she said, and I asked her to repeat what she had just said.

“Kayak,” she said and then spelled it out for me. “Like the Indians did. That's how they saw the world. They got in their kayaks and paddled to different places when they got bored.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I'm going to have my adventure.”

“I see,” I said, when at the time I clearly didn't see anything at all.

With nothing to do at the hospital, I took a taxi to the Petosky airport.

The front door was locked, but when I knocked a woman in a ski parka opened the door.

“You caught me napping,” she said. Her checks were red, her eyes puffy. I apologized.

“The Blue Goose arrives in an hour.” She pointed to the door leading out to the tarmac. The Petosky County Airport has so few flights that instead of numbers they use nicknames. One airline, one gate—the Blue Goose arrives from Detroit at 4:00
P.M.
every day, the Canadian Fowl in from Sault Ste. Marie at noon, and the Chicago Eagle at 8:30 every other evening.

Megan and Nina, the only women on a flight with seven businessmen, were last off the plane.

“Welcome to Petosky,” I said.

Megan was surprised to see me. “You left Mom alone?”

“She's sleeping,” I said. “This trip exhausted her.”

“I bet,” Megan said.

Nina stood a few feet away from Megan and me. Nina has always been closer to Megan. I used to think it had to do with size—they are exactly the same size and have shared clothes since they graduated from Catholic grade-school uniforms. Even now they borrow each other's dresses, good shoes, winter dress coats. Their lives continue to be similar, just as they were when we were growing up. They both work for General Motors, Megan out in the Lake Orion plant, Nina in an accounting division at the headquarters downtown. They both live in suburban Detroit, and both their husbands are from Indiana, a detail that sealed, at least for me, their similarities. Nina is still debating whether or not to have kids, but when she does, I'm sure she'll have two. Just like Megan.

Nina hugged me stiffly. Her oversized carry-on bag swung off her shoulder and hit me on the top of my right thigh. I could tell she was trying not to be angry with me.

“Why'd you have to do something so stupid?” she asked after Megan was out of hearing range. “Really, Caroline. Doesn't the family have enough to worry about without you doing something stupid like this?” Nina wears the same perfume as my mother, and the musky odor startled me until I got used to it. Then it seemed to underline why we were talking like this.

“Megan's furious,” Nina whispered. “She wants to know what happened.”

“She already knows everything,” I told her. “We talked on the phone for half an hour.”

Nina shook her head. “The police told Megan you were standing on the side of the river. They said you let her get in the boat. You stood right there and let her do it.”

“Close,” I said. I moved my hands apart as if to measure the distance. “I got pretty close. The river is right beside a beech forest, so it's hard to get right up to the river. The state park is a maple and beech tree haven. You'll find more of those trees there than anywhere else in the world.”

“Don't,” Nina warned and started walking toward Megan and the car-rental woman.

“Don't what?” I followed alongside her.

“Don't do this.”

“Don't do what?”

“You treat this like some kind of joke, and Megan's going to explode,” she said. “You have no idea how angry she is.”

“What about you?” I asked. “Are you mad, too?” The other passengers arriving on the Blue Goose had gone, and the large room was again quiet except for the clicking of the baggage carousel, which had circled with only a few pieces of luggage.

“I just don't know what you and Mom have been up to,” Nina sighed, and I knew she and Megan had argued this over and over on the flight north.

“We haven't been up to anything,” I said. “No one's been up to anything.”

“Sometimes when I'm over at the house I feel like I'm walking into some kind of secret club. All sorts of whispering and planning.”

“There isn't any club,” I said, but Nina walked away and joined Megan by the door. The woman told me she had enjoyed talking with me, and I thanked her.

The wind was coming off Lake Michigan, cold and sharp, nothing at all to do with spring, when we stepped outside.

“I can drive,” I volunteered.

“No.” Megan shook her head. “Absolutely not.”

“I know my way around,” I argued. “It'll be easier than me yelling out directions every two minutes.”

“You don't have a license,” Megan said. “Remember?”

“Would one of you open the door?” Nina said. She had her hands deep inside her coat pockets, and she looked tired. “I don't care who drives the car. Just open it.”

“It's not illegal for me to drive,” I said. “I just lost my license. I can still drive.” But I handed the keys over and got into the backseat so Nina could sit closer to the heat vents.