We Are Not Ourselves(7)

That summer, her mother bought a window air-conditioning unit from Stevens on Queens Boulevard. She had the delivery man install it in the bedroom she shared with Eileen. No one else on their floor had an air conditioner. She invited Mrs. Grady and Mrs. Long over and into the bedroom, where they stood before the unit’s indefatigable wind, staring as though at a savior child possessed of healing powers.

When both her parents were home, an uneasy truce prevailed. Her mother closed the bedroom door and sat by the window, watching night encroach on the street. Eileen brought her tea after dinner. Her father stationed himself at the kitchen table, puffing at his pipe and listening to Irish football. At least they were under the same roof.

She hated thinking of her mother riding the trains. She saw her mother’s body sprawled in dark subway tunnels as she sat at the kitchen table for hours watching the door. As soon as she heard the key shunting the dead bolt aside, she rose to put the kettle on or wash dishes. She wouldn’t give her mother the satisfaction of knowing she was worried about her.

One night, after she had cooked the dinner and washed the pots and pans, she nestled exhausted into the couch, where her mother sat smoking a cigarette and staring ahead. Tentatively, she laid her head in her mother’s lap and kept still. She watched the smoke pour through her mother’s pale lips and the ash get longer. Other than a few new wrinkles around the mouth and some blossoms of burst blood vessels on her cheeks, her mother’s skin was still smooth and full and porcelain white. She still had those dramatic lips. Only her stained teeth showed evidence of wear.

“Why don’t you give me hugs and kisses like the mothers on television?”

Eileen waited for her to say something sharp in response, but her mother just stubbed out the butt and picked up the pack to smoke another. There was a long silence.

“Don’t you think you’re a little old for this?” her mother finally asked. Eventually she moved Eileen aside and rose to pour herself a tall drink. She sat back down with it.

“I wasn’t like your father,” she said. “I couldn’t wait to escape the farm. I remember I was packing my bag, I heard my father say to my mother, ‘Deirdre, let her go. This is no place for a young person.’ I was eighteen. I came looking for Arcadia, but instead I found domestic work on Long Island. I rode the train out and back in the crepuscular hours. Cre-pus-cular. You probably don’t know what that word means.”

She could tell her mother had begun one of those sodden monologues she delivered from time to time, full of edgy eloquence. Eileen just sat and listened.

“I used to daydream about living in the mansions I cleaned. I liked to do windows, everyone else’s least-favorite job. I could look out on rolling lawns. They didn’t have a single rock, those lawns. I liked to look at the tennis courts. Perfectly level, and not a twig out of place. They suggested . . . what?—the taming of chaos. I liked the windswept dunes, the spray of crashing waves, the sailboats tied to docks. And when I went out to run the rag over the other side, I looked in on women reclining on divans like cats that had supped from bowls of milk. I didn’t begrudge them their ease. In their place, I would have planted myself on an elbow from the moment I rose in the morning until the time came for me”—her mother made a languorous gesture with her finger that reminded Eileen of the way bony Death pointed—“to be prodded back to the silken sheets.”

“It sounds nice,” Eileen said.

“It wasn’t nice,” her mother said sharply after the few beats it took her thoughts to cohere. “It was—marvelous, is what it was.”

? ? ?

A few days before Christmas, her mother told her to take the train in to Loft’s a little before the end of her shift. When Eileen arrived, her mother looked so effortlessly composed that one would never know she’d become a serious drinker. Eileen walked around the store in stupefaction, gaping at the handcrafted, glazed, and filigreed confections.

When her mother was done, she gave Eileen a box of truffles to take home and walked her over to Fifth Avenue and down to Thirty-Ninth Street, to the windows of Lord & Taylor, which Eileen had seen only in pictures in the newspaper. The scenes behind the windows, with their warmly lit fireplaces and silky-looking upholstered miniature furniture, gave her the same feeling she’d had when she’d stood before that great lawn and peered up into the perfect world of the garden apartments. Gorgeous drapery framed a picture she wanted to climb into and live in. Brisk winds blew, but the air was not too cold, and the refreshing smell of winter tickled her nose. In the remnant daylight, the avenue began to take on some of the enchanted quality visible behind the windows. It thrilled her to imagine that passersby saw an ordinary mother-daughter pair enjoying a routine evening of shopping together. She checked people’s faces for evidence of what they were thinking: What a nice little family.

“Christmas gets the full treatment,” her mother said in the train on the way home. “Mind that you remember that. It doesn’t matter what else is going on. You could be at death’s door, I don’t care.”

That night, her mother tucked her in for the first time since she’d gone into the hospital. When Eileen awoke in the middle of the night and saw the other bed empty, she stumbled out to find her mother sitting on the couch. For a terrible instant, Eileen thought her mother was dead. Her head hung back, mouth open. Her hand clutched the empty tumbler. Eileen drew close and watched her chest rise and fall, then took the ashtray from her lap and the tumbler from her hand, careful not to wake her, and brought both to the kitchen sink. She took the blanket from her mother’s bed and spread it over her. She slept with the door open in order to see her from where she lay.