Never Coming Back(7)

So: Jeopardy! A television game show was what we had left.

When I visited, we usually sat in the community room down the hall from her bedroom, watching. I arrived in plenty of time, many minutes before the show began at 7:30 p.m., because Tamar hated to be late. All her life she had hated to be late, but of late, her lateness hatred had intensified. On one such visit the television was already on, muttering low, a cooking show in which the contestants were given baskets of unknown ingredients from which to prepare a feast.

“That’s not the right ______” my mother said, and turned to me.

______ was what the look on her face meant, which was Help me, I can’t find the right word. It’s here, it’s near, it’s just out of reach.

“Channel,” I said. I took the remote from the coffee table and clicked. “Here we go.”

Jeopardy! was the most-watched television game show in history and Alex Trebek was its longest-running and most intimidating host. Contestants often seemed to cower before him. That night, a tax accountant was in the lead. He kept pressing the buzzer first, in an annoyingly fast and tense way, beating the other two contestants.

“Baseball for two hundred, please,” he said.

Sometimes known as the white Josh Gibson was the clue.

“Who the hell’s Josh Gibson?”

I was talking to myself, but from the look on the tax accountant’s face, he was thinking the same thing. This was his second night on the show. Baseball for $200, the lowest bet possible. Most contestants started with the lowest. They thought small, confined themselves. They put themselves in the prison of tiny bets. The tax man was no different.

“I mean, I’ve never heard of the guy,” I said.

My mother sat next to me eating fudge. Peanut butter fudge, which I had brought her as a gift from Vermont, where I had spent the day hiking. Driving back, I took Route 9 west across the very bottom of the state so that I could stop at the Hogback Mountain gift shop and buy my mother half a pound of her favorite fudge. Fudge was delicious. Fudge was safe.

She slivered off wafers with the plastic knife they included and ate them one at a time. The community room, which my mother had begun to call the Plant Room, contained a television, a plant stand full of orchids, a green couch, that fake Persian carpet and two rocking chairs. A long swatch of black paint on the floor guarded the sliding doors to the back garden. After a certain point in the progression of the disease, the black swatch was often perceived as a black hole into which you would fall and from which you would not return.

That was what they told me, anyway. “It takes a while to get to that point,” they also told me, reassuringly.

But in the last month I had come upon my mother standing three feet away from that swatch of black paint, looking at those locked doors, with their view of the outdoors, the world beyond this one room. I had seen my mother’s body physically leaning toward those doors, her arms reaching for them, reaching for the outdoors that all her life she had loved. And I had watched her look down at that black paint, regarding it in fear.

No one was ever in the Plant Room except her, and she was almost always in there. Once in a while someone poked his or her head around the doorway—“How you doing, Miz Winter?”—and we both nodded. We were the two Miz Winters.

“‘The white Josh Gibson,’” Tamar said, in clear, calm and measured tones, just like the tax man. “Who is Babe Ruth?”

When I was a child and my mother and I used to watch Jeopardy! together, I would sit on the couch next to her, shouting out answers that were almost always wrong. Her? Nothing. Until now, when she wasn’t even looking at the television. She was focused on the little white box of fudge, slivering herself off another delicate portion.

“Josh Gibson was a slugger,” she said to the fudge, pincered between her thumb and finger. “He could catch too.”

The fudge said nothing but she shook her head as if it had asked her a question.

“No,” she said. “Gentleman’s agreement. Criminal.”

None of what she said made sense, but she was done talking. She wrapped the remaining chunk of fudge up in its tissue paper, laid the plastic knife next to it and closed up the little box. Then she handed it to me and I handed her the book I had brought. Fudge for book. An even trade-off.

“Charlotte’s Web,” I said. “In case it looks familiar.”

It was one of the books that had lined the walls of my room in our old house and spilled out into the rest of the house. One of the books I had read over and over and over. When I was growing up, Tamar had given me a book for every birthday and every Christmas and every first day of school and every last day of school, books that she thought I would like: about pioneer girls, children who lived on their own, shipwrecked families, solo adventurers. She knew the kind of book I loved and she knew that hardcovers were what I loved. When it came to books for me, my mother did not stint, and those books were all that she had saved for me from the desecration of the house. My childhood books, Dog’s ashes and that single duct-taped-shut shoebox that I had not opened.

Tamar herself owned exactly one book when I was growing up: a tattered paperback of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. For as long as I could remember, that book—that embarrassing self-help-ish book with the picture of the seagull on the cover—sat on the shelf above the woodstove in the kitchen. Now it sat between two bookends on the windowsill of the unopenable window in her room at the place where she lived. Besides her clothes, it was the only thing she brought with her from Sterns.