They May Not Mean To, But They Do(31)
Rabbi Kenny laughed. “Well, if you’re ever locked out of the house or something, pop into shul.”
18
Molly burrowed into the pillows, eyes closed, a cool scented breeze blowing in through the open window. She listened to the crows in the neighbor’s sycamore. The deplorable tree shed darkness and elephantine leaves, but high in its branches there lived a family of crows, an exemplary family, crow sons and daughters from the year before helping out with their new siblings, all sober as a portrait of Queen Victoria and her own mob of children.
There were pomegranates and grapes growing over her neighbors’ fences. One house had a garden of neon-colored succulents, another a cheery garden of pink and yellow roses. Molly never argued with anyone who described Los Angeles as a jumbled and incoherent city, a nightmare of traffic bordered by jumbled, incoherent rows of houses in every architectural style known to man. Its flora was jumbled, too, incoherent and abundant palm trees and pine trees, roses and cacti. The place was a foreign country as far as Molly was concerned. And after almost sixty years in New York, years of Manhattan in all its might and frantic momentum, every day felt like a day of blessed vacation in a faraway vacation land. Work did not interfere with this holiday feeling. She could hardly believe her luck. Some sky above her, some sun. Some crows.
She thought of her mother shivering and feeble in the biting January wind. A disconcerting tableau: her lovely mother, her lively mother, bundled and drained, shuffling like a refugee in her own life.
Molly had always thought of her mother as someone sharp and bright, someone light and airy, full of color and warmth and intensity. A kind of maternal sun goddess, always there whether she showed herself or not, always there behind the inevitable clouds of Molly’s life, of the family’s life. Like Aaron, Joy had been both attentive and absentminded as a parent, but to Molly the periodic negligence was freedom, it was privacy, independence. If Joy worked late or was out of town at a conference and the cupboard was bare like a nursery-rhyme cupboard, Daniel and Molly rejoiced, for that meant hamburgers or pizza or Chinese food or a trip with Aaron to the market to buy the makings of eggplant Parmesan, his specialty. The pressure from such kind and consistently inconsistent parents was negligible. Joy and Aaron held, for reasons the children did not understand but did not question, an unshakable faith in Molly and Daniel. If either child stepped out of line, the line moved accordingly. Even now, Molly could feel Joy trying to forgive her, to understand her act of geographical treachery. But Molly could hardly understand it herself. She had fallen in love. She had been offered a job. She woke up happy every morning. Those were facts. Why did she feel she had to explain them, excuse them; why weren’t those facts the explanations in and of themselves?
Molly called her mother every day. She never mentioned the sunshine and the soft breeze. It would be in bad taste to call Joy’s attention to the glorious physical reality of Los Angeles. Joy called Molly every day, too, sometimes more than once: she was still so weak from the C. diff, the wind was ferocious, the mayor said something appalling. Sometimes she called to tell a funny story or report on the medical progress of someone Molly had never met, to urge Molly to watch something on television, to discuss her health or Aaron’s behavior or a doctor’s report or a possible side effect of a pill neither of them was taking. “I told Dr. Moritz he gives me a reason to live,” she would say after a dentist appointment. “I have to live many, many years to amortize the cost of these new implants.” Molly would laugh. Her mother often made her laugh. Just as often Molly listened annoyed and impatient, yet even then she found herself soothed by the inconsequential drip, drip, drip of the conversation. Her mother’s voice made her feel safe, safe from the loss of her mother.
“You’re too far away,” Joy said.
“So are you,” Molly said, but she said it gently, and she meant it.
She also meant to visit every six weeks. It did not work out to be quite that often.
“Don’t come, don’t come, this is the worst winter we’ve ever had, it’s not even safe to go outside,” Joy told her, and Molly pretended she thought her mother meant what she said. She put off her visit for two weeks, three weeks, then a month. The snow fell in New York, then fell again. “The sidewalks are sheets of ice,” Joy would say. “Treacherous sheets of ice.” The weathermen warned the elderly to stay inside. It was too cold, too windy, too icy. “I went downstairs just to stick my nose out the door, just to get some fresh air, just a walk to the corner, but the doorman wouldn’t let me leave the building. Not one step. Far too dangerous.”
“The doorman takes better care of my parents than I do,” Molly said to Freddie one morning, a beautiful morning, the air brilliant and blue.
Freddie handed her a cup of coffee. “Thank god for those doormen.”
“My mother says she has cabin fever. You know, I couldn’t do anything about that even if I were there. I can’t change the weather. And she won’t come out here, even to visit, even for a week. Well, how could she? She can’t leave Daddy, and he certainly can’t come. So what good would I be there anyway if they can’t leave the house? I mean, I spend more time with my mother on the phone now than I ever did in person when I lived in the city.”
Molly was talking to herself, Freddie understood that, and she sat in the winter sunshine not quite listening. Her own father had a new girlfriend. It was causing ripples of resentment in the facility, and not only from his former girlfriends. The social worker seemed somehow offended, too. “They’re all over each other,” she’d said in the last call.