Never Coming Back(3)

“Why so tiny?” Brown said, his eyes lit up, as if there had to be a fascinating reason.

But there wasn’t. If there was a reason at all it was about excess, the existence of it and the not wanting it. It was about not having room for anything more than was physically in the cabin. Because there was already something huge in my nonphysical life, something that couldn’t be wrestled down into a manageable, handle-able size.

Sunshine and Brown stepped inside the single room and stood on either side of the ladder that led to the sleeping loft and looked around. They didn’t touch anything that first visit. It must have looked like a dollhouse. Like a museum. Everything perfectly in its place because there were so few places for anything. Two towels, one in use and one hung over the door to dry. Three pairs of socks in a drawer with two shirts and two pairs of jeans. No waffle iron, no hair dryer, no cupboards filled with dishes and pots and pans. A half-full bottle of Jack Daniel’s sat on top of the miniature fridge next to the miniature stove next to a small blue ceramic jug that held the ashes of Dog.

“Nothing in excess, I see,” Brown said.

“Except books,” Sunshine said. “Books are definitely in excess.”

They were talking to each other as if I weren’t right there in the room with them.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but is that coffee table made of books?”

“It is. So is that lamp stand.”

“So is this dining table,” Brown said. He crouched to examine the construction of my table. A piece of plywood set on four cornered stacks of books. He gave the plywood an experimental push. It slid, but not much. Plywood was heavier than it looked.

“Oh my God, Brown,” Sunshine said. She had climbed up into the sleeping loft. “Get up here and take a look at her bed. She’s literally sleeping with books. On books. Books as box spring.”

“Hello,” I said. “Hello? I’m right here. I can hear you.”

They ignored me.

“How do I love thee, books?” Brown said. “Let me count the ways.”

“Her one true love,” Sunshine said. “Some things do not change.”

I lifted the bottle of Jack from its perch and went out onto the porch to wait until they finished with their self-guided tour. It’s a monument to minimalism, I heard Brown say from the sleeping loft, and She’s winnowed, Sunshine said, but isn’t she too young to be winnowed? Winnow, winnowing, winnowed, which was a word that sounded like “widowed.” Once you started giving things up, it became easy. Or easier.

Not everything, though. Not everything could be given up.

If my mother could not remain the same, then something else must. That first little fool of a pig built a house of straw, and the second pig built one of sticks, and down they both came. But the third little pig, that little pig built a house of bricks, and it stood.

Books were something real. Books were something true. Books would be my bricks.





* * *





After the Mr. Orange Juice incident, things went downhill fast. My mother forgot to call two Thursdays in a row. When I called her instead, she was first surprised and then annoyed and then insistent that we had already spoken. Then, a week later, she was pulled over on top of Starr Hill, driving erratically, suspicion of DWI, but there was no alcohol in her bloodstream. Which I could have told them; she didn’t drink and never had. The state trooper knew her, from back in the days when she was justice of the peace of the town of Sterns, and he let her off with a warning. Then he tracked me down on the Panhandle, via her neighbor William T. Jones, who had my phone number in case of emergency, and filled me in. And back I came, into Syracuse and from there in a rental car to Sterns, where I found her sitting at the kitchen table, an open can of olives on her right and an open jar of marinated artichoke hearts on her left. My mother had always eaten straight out of jars and cans, with a cocktail fork as her sole utensil. It was one of her peculiarities.

“Hi, Ma.”

Her cocktail fork was balanced between her thumb and index finger, close to her mouth, as if it were a joint that had just been passed to her and she wasn’t sure what to do with it. Getting high was something else my mother had never done.

“Clara.”

“How are you, Ma?”

She looked straight at me and locked eyes. “I don’t want anyone to know about this,” she said. “No one.”

“About what?”

She waved the cocktail fork/joint at me. A slash in the air. Zip it, Clara.

“Alzheimer’s,” she said. “You know it. I know it. Annabelle and William T. know it. The doctor knows it. No one else.”

In the time that had passed between Mr. Orange Juice and the state trooper’s warning she had taken herself down to Utica, to a specialist. She had been through multiple tests. She had gone to the library—my mother, a computerless woman—and read up on the disease.

None of this had she told me.

Her fourth doctor’s appointment was the following morning. She sat silently next to me, the doctor on one side of the desk, my mother and I on the other. It wasn’t an examining room, because the examination was over. She couldn’t draw a clock. You had to be able to draw a clock. I willed her hand to start moving in the right direction—Clock, Ma, clock—but no.