Ask Again Later Page 6

  “And I’m stuck in the middle,” Marjorie says.

  “A person with two watches never knows what time it is,” I say. “Fire one of them.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Marjorie replies.

  “You’re right. Fire both of them,” I say. “This is why you have no money, by the way. Which I know was going to be your next question. They keep signing you up for things you can’t afford, and you keep saying yes.”

  “You really care about me, don’t you?” Marjorie says. “No one else talks to me like that.”

  “I don’t talk to anyone else like that,” I say. It’s a relief to speak the blunt truth, and to be loved for it instead of loathed.

  “I’m so emotional right now, and I hate Malcolm,” Marjorie says. “You know what I caught him doing this morning?”

  “What?” I ask.

  “Sitting down to pee!” Marjorie says.

  “That son of a bitch!” I say.

  “It’s not funny,” Marjorie says.

  “Well…” I say.

  “I’m about to have a baby. I need someone strong. Not a man who sits to pee,” Marjorie says, looking like she may cry.

  “Maybe his willingness to sit to pee means he’s the ultimate male. Not afraid of stereotypes and posturing,” I say. “Why should men have to stand up to pee?”

  “He called you, didn’t he? He told you to say that!” Marjorie says.

  “I’ve been at Sloan-Kettering all morning with Mom,” I say. “She had some pre-op testing, and she’s really into the relaxation workshops. I think she has a crush on someone in the class. The lumpectomy happens in a few weeks.”

  “I’m really sorry. I’ve been talking about myself the whole time,” Marjorie says. “How is Mom doing? She hasn’t told me anything. Keeps saying she doesn’t want me to stress out while I’m pregnant. How big is the tumor?”

  “Size of a pea,” I say.

  “I was going to ask which food they compared it to—orange, grapefruit, cantaloupe. Worried it would sound insensitive,” Marjorie says.

  “You? Insensitive?” I say.

  “A pea is good news,” Marjorie says, brightening.

  “That’s what her oncologist said, too,” I say. “But it’s still hard to get excited about good-bad news. I need to work on that, I guess.”

  “How’s she handling it?” Marjorie asks.

  “She’s in intense organizing mode,” I say. “Meaning very worried.”

  “What about you?” Marjorie says.

  “Melancholy half of the time,” I say. “Annoyed the other half. But most of the time, you know, things are remarkably the same, which is both comforting and kind of a shame.”

  “It sounds like things are going well, all things considered,” Marjorie says. “Especially if you don’t factor in the part where you quit your job, moved in with Mom, and left Sam just hanging out there.”

  “Is that payback for the comment I made about why you don’t have any money, or because I agree that Malcolm should sit to pee if he wants to?” I ask.

  “Both. We’re even now,” Marjorie says. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Stop by and visit her, maybe ask her to go out to lunch,” I say.

  “Oh, there are some good trunk shows coming up; maybe she’d like that,” Marjorie says.

  She gets out her personal organizer. It’s Hermès. It’s orange. She flips it open. Not a single square on the calendar is blank. What can’t fit in the squares is in the margins, with arrows pointing toward a date. Opportunities on the sidelines.

  “There’s something at the Whitney on Tuesday. A thing at the Central Park Zoo on Wednesday. The ballet’s annual Hawaiian Night is coming up!” Marjorie is visibly excited by this last realization. Actually shaking a bit in anticipation.

  “Hawaiian Night?” I ask.

  “So fun! We get to dance the hula and wear floral dresses!” Marjorie says.

  “It sounds perfect,” I say.

  Nana

  ONCE A MONTH I drive to the Short Hills Mall in New Jersey to visit my grandmother. Nana.

  Nana is a mall walker. No map required. She uses landmarks to navigate. A shop that sells pink and blue eye shadow, tiaras, and faux Hope diamonds to nine-year-olds is her North Star.

  “Join a gym,” I say.

  “Oh, piffle, why would I do that?” Nana says. “So I can be the old lady at the gym? No thank you.”

  “So I don’t have to be related to a mall walker,” I say.

  “Stop being selfish and mind your own business,” Nana says.

  “Can we take a water break?” I ask.

  “If we must,” Nana says.

  We take a seat at a coffee place. She knows a handful of mall-walking octogenarians who also use the mall as their adjunct gym/office.

  “How’s Joan?” Nana asks.

  “Good,” I say. “Hard to tell actually. One minute she’s optimistic, then in denial, then just very, very busy doing nothing that matters.”

  “That’s normal. To want to keep busy, to keep it out of your mind. My scare came at about her age,” Nana says.

  Her scare? What scare?

  “You had cancer?” I say.

  “Oh, sure,” Nana says.

  “I never knew that,” I say.

  Our family history is a never-ending surprise party.

  “It was right after the divorce. You girls came to see me in the hospital. Your mother told you I had my tonsils removed,” Nana says. “It seemed ridiculous, but she said she was trying to space out the awful news. Organizing, as usual.”

  “I don’t know what to say. Really. I’m at a loss.”

  “Well, once you have it it’s never off your radar again,” she continues. “After six years you think about it less, after ten years, you take a deep breath. Feel lucky. At fifteen years you really start to think things might be okay. So far, so good. It’s been almost twenty-five years.”

  “They’ve scheduled her lumpectomy. It’s in a few weeks,” I say. “Maybe you can call her, or go to the hospital.”

  “She’d hate that,” Nana says. “We haven’t spoken in years; she won’t want me visiting her in a hospital when she’s vulnerable.”

  “You’re her mother. Aren’t you supposed to call the shots?” I ask.

  Magical Obsessions

  SITTING ACROSS FROM PAUL, I stare into space. I mentally reshuffle the books on his bookshelves. Organize them by color of spine. Surprisingly few books have turquoise covers. They pop out at you. Then I reorganize them from tallest to shortest, also in my head.

  “So, where are you right now?” Paul asks.

  “Reorganizing your books again,” I say. “It’s strangely satisfying.”

  “Another magical obsession,” Paul says.

  “I wouldn’t call it an obsession,” I say. “Or magical.”

  “What would you call it?” Paul asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “It’s not important what you call it. You can call it an obsession if you want to.”

  “Thanks,” Paul says.

  I return to staring and reorganizing. I hope he doesn’t interrupt again. Because if he does I’ll have to start organizing the books all over. I notice individual reams of paper near his desk. Different brands. He’s buying paper by the individual ream. Is he a Rockefeller or something?

  “That’s the most expensive way to buy paper, you realize,” I say. “You should buy it by the case, it’s half the price. Even less than half the price. You’re throwing money away.”

  “Are you worried about my finances?” Paul asks.

  “No,” I say. “I don’t know; maybe I’m just worried in general. Mostly I’m just sitting here wondering why on earth my mother didn’t ever tell me that my grandmother had cancer, too. How could that not come up? My grandmother had cancer when she was my mother’s age—that’s not worth mentioning? Not worth tossing into a conversation somewhere along the line? The number of family secrets is just staggering.”

  �
��The surprise is that you continue to be surprised,” Paul says.

  Roommates

  THERE OUGHT TO BE some kind of Hallmark holiday celebrating nurses and home-health-care workers. These people are living saints. I don’t know how they do it.

  My biggest challenge is getting my mother to sit still. She’s been sneaking off to Bikram yoga classes. When she thinks I’m sleeping, she calls the New School on a daily basis to see if there’s been any movement on the waitlist for the six-part sushi-making class.

  According to Mom, her doctor recommended rest, relaxation, and meditation prior to surgery. I’m torn between wanting her to follow doctor’s orders and wanting her to live her life.

  We play hearts. She cheats when I go to the kitchen to get us water. She says she was joking, not cheating. We switch to Scrabble, which gets even more heated. Mom claims it’s okay to use British spellings and Spanish words. Only if you’re playing Scrabble in the U.K. or Mexico, I say. For the record, she’s good at Scrabble. Crossword-puzzle people are always good at Scrabble.

  Maybe we should paint or spend our time doing crafts. Anything that involves a less definitive outcome. Games with clear winners and losers aren’t good for us. But instead of creative pursuits, we’ve taken the easy way out and turned on the TV.

  We’ve started watching The Passionate & the Youthful. Daytime TV isn’t just a guilty pleasure. It is crack cocaine. You try and break the habit.

  We narrowed the search for “our show” based on start times. Mom has to be home at eleven A.M. to take her medications. She can’t take them on an empty stomach, so we’ve begun our ritual of green tea, cookies, medication, and settling ourselves in front of the TV.

  I never realized that soap operas largely revolve around hospitals. There is always the two-faced nurse, who wants to sleep with the hot and altruistic doctor, who spends his vacation fixing the cleft palates of orphans in South America. The former stripper turned nurse who fears her past will be revealed. Once a week a patient arriving at the ER threatens to ID her. There’s always a foreign doctor self-medicating for reasons unknown, and a male nurse who has a suspicious number of elderly patients dying under his watchful “care.”

  I can speak with some authority when I say The Passionate & the Youthful is the best of the bunch, because we sampled them all for several days before settling on our favorite.

  We found true happiness at the supermarket when Mom discovered Soap Opera Weekly. A magazine devoted to the on-and off-screen antics of daytime television celebrities. We had to buy two copies because we didn’t want to share.

  It’s over pistachios and raspberry tea that I finally have the guts to say it.

  “Mom, I’m not nurse material,” I say.

  “I don’t need a nurse,” Mom says. “I feel perfectly lovely.”

  “We should have had this conversation before I quit my job,” I say.

  “Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy you’re here. But I’m not the reason you quit that job,” Mom says. “I have no idea why you turned out so afraid.”

  “I don’t either,” I say. It’s half true.

  My second-grade teacher’s euphemism for a lie was “half truth.” But it’s not that straightforward. Like most big decisions, quitting my job was part of a chain reaction waiting for the perfect combination of events to set it off.

  I wouldn’t have quit my job if she had not been diagnosed. Yet she is not the reason I quit my job. She is the push that got me to quit the job, which I was all too happy to quit in the moment. It was a convenient time to escape getting closer to Sam. It also looked like I might have a helpful role in my mother’s life. A closeness that was never there. I had a split second to choose at the fork in the road, and I chose the past instead of the future. I don’t regret choosing the well-traveled road.

  But to say she has no clue what I’m afraid of…As far as I know, my mom hasn’t had a relationship that was important to her since my father disappeared. It’s more than a little terrifying to be all she has.

  Jim’s Office

  IT’S WINTER, and I walk the eighteen blocks to my father’s office in new boots. I’m taking him up on his offer of lunch, which he made out of politeness that day at my mom’s. He’s rescheduled twice already. I’ll be shocked if he’s at work when I arrive.

  Since I now must account for the time I spend away from my mother, I walk everywhere. It allows me to leave home twenty minutes early for each outing. Because when I’m not with her, that must mean there is something more important…some competition for my attention.

  I show identification, then take the elevator to the twenty-ninth floor. The elevator seems to fly straight up in the air, and I feel taller when it stops. Above the little people. Height by association. I exit the elevator. There is a wide corridor leading to a large wooden desk, encased in bank-type bulletproof glass. It is the nucleus of this legal establishment. The stopgap. I’m guessing it’s a post–9/11 installation. A moderately useful monument to over-the-top security measures.

  A gray-haired woman sits behind the desk. She adjusts her glasses. She doesn’t recognize me, so she waves me off with her hand and returns to her paperback.

  I knock on the glass. She doesn’t look up. I pace. I knock again. She ignores the knock. The perfect analogy for the relationship I have with my father. He’s right there, around the corner, less than fifty feet away. And so unreachable.

  I knock on the glass again. The old woman shrugs. Points to the elevator. I point to her, and then to the door. I mouth the words “I’m here to meet Jim—Jim Rhode.”

  Someone else approaches the glass door. Raps his knuckles, and shakes the handle.

  “Her vision isn’t great,” he says. “And she refuses to make coffee, but—”

  “She’s a good kisser?” I say.

  “Well, that, too,” he says. “But I was going to say that she bakes these amazing homemade pies every few weeks.”

  A loud dull buzz precedes a loud click, followed by the sound of vibrating glass. The freeing of the lock. He holds it for me. “Who are you here to see?” he asks.

  “Jim Rhode,” I say.

  “Check fraud? Divorce? New will? Nothing violent, I hope,” he says.

  “Free lunch,” I say. Avoiding my life. Breaking in some new shoes. The list could go on and on.

  “I’m Will. That’s Esther,” he says, pointing to the coot behind the glass. “Don’t get on her bad side,” Will says.

  Will looks young. Too young to be a lawyer. He should be at a frat house, doing rip cords.

  “I’m Emily,” I say, shaking his hand.

  Will points me in the direction of Jim’s office. I walk down the hallway. I knock.

  “Come in,” Jim says.

  It is well lit. Clean, but messy. His desk is old. His bookcases are full. He has a crystal paperweight on his desk. A lion.

  “Did you remember lunch?” I ask. “You said to meet you here.”

  “Yes,” Jim says. “Yes, of course I remembered. How’s your mother?”

  “Good. Most of the time. She vacillates between ‘Should I redecorate the co-op’ to ‘If I die, I want you to be in charge of who gets my eyes; give my other organs to anyone you want, but my eyes are special!’” I say. “An exchange student who lived with us in the early nineties is at the house helping her organize personal papers. It’s good for her to feel like she’s controlling someone.”

  “Yes, she always excelled at that. Glad to hear she has a project. She’s always liked a project,” Jim says. He reminds me of my mother when he says this.

  “That’s a unique take on cancer,” I say. “A project…”

  “Well, I was really talking about getting her personal papers in order, but I can see how you might have heard it that way,” Jim says.

  We walk out to the reception area.

  “Who’s the girl, Jim?” Esther asks.

  “We met on the way in,” I say. “I’m Emily.”

  She extends her hand to shake and
surprises me by squeezing my hand as hard as she can, harnessing all of ninety-five pounds into that iron goddess grip.

  “Ouch,” I say. I pull my hand away from the Claw.

  “Weren’t expecting me to be so strong, were you?” Esther says.

  No, I just wasn’t expecting you to be so damn mean!

  “Not really,” I say.

  We wait for the elevator, and then wave good-bye to Esther and the Plexiglas that protects her from the sneezes of strangers.

  “What’s her problem?” I ask.

  “Oh, you know how some people have to prove themselves every single day of the week,” Jim says. “I feel for her, I really do. But it’s no excuse for stealing. We can’t tolerate a thief here. The group is too small. It feels personal.”

  “What does she steal?” I ask.

  “It started small. Pens. Paper. A few weeks ago she came in on a Sunday. Wheeled a bookcase right out of here. Security caught the whole thing on tape,” Jim says.

  “Wow, what did she say when you showed her the tape?” I asked.

  “Oh, we haven’t confronted her. We don’t want to humiliate anyone; we just want her to move along and think it was her idea to leave,” Jim says.

  Jim takes a quick look at what I’m wearing.

  “You’re underdressed,” Jim says.

  “You never said where we were going,” I say. “It’s nothing new, though. I never have a clue where I’m going.”

  “It’s okay,” Jim says.

  “It’s going to have to be,” I say.

  I decide I need some talking points. Jim and I do not accomplish much when we talk. I’m half shocked that the mirage has a voice.

  I make a mental list. Favorite color? Who cares? MAC or PC? Lefty or righty? Flat or sparkling? Now we’re getting somewhere! In no particular order I start to list some of my favorite things. Getting a new CD, playing it over and over again for an entire weekend. Craving song 8, but not fast-forwarding to 8. Just waiting and enjoying the internal countdown. Driving go-karts. Kayaking. Baking cupcakes. Finding something I’ve lost. Reading a book I can’t put down.