They May Not Mean To, But They Do(41)

Her eyes full of tears, Joy gave a small smile. “You will have a coatrack,” she said, “in case it rains?”





25

Some people had implied, even said outright, that it would be a relief for Joy when Aaron died. Tactless, Molly had thought then. But now that her father was gone, she wondered. The stress of looking after Aaron had been so fierce. Without it, Joy seemed calmer, softer. Even on the phone from California, Molly could sense it, as if her mother’s voice, her whole temperament, were gently muted.

Daniel, who went to see Joy every day after work, confirmed this.

“How is she?” Molly asked him. She often called when she knew he would be at the apartment.

Daniel, phone to his ear, poked his mother, who sat beside him at the dining-room table. “Mom,” he said, “Molly wants to know how you are.”

“As well as can be expected,” said Joy.

He nodded. It had been three weeks. “As well as can be expected,” he said into the phone.

“Oh good!”

He wasn’t sure what was to be expected in three weeks, but he did not say that to Molly. It was hard for her, being so far away. It was hard for him, too, being so close.

Joy had been quiet in those three weeks. She didn’t complain. It was almost as if Aaron’s death were a liberation, once the funeral and all the hubbub associated with it were over, if a sad smile and general acquiescence to everything Daniel said or proposed meant liberation. He hoped it did. Yes, he was sure it did.

When he told his mother he had to get home, he saw her panic for a second. Then she said, “Off you go.”

“Sorry I can’t stay for dinner.”

Joy looked confused, as if dinner were a rarely performed ritual.

“Maybe tomorrow,” Daniel said.

“Tomorrow?”

Joy shuffled in her slippers to the front door.

“Mom, are you okay? Really?” He held both her hands and kissed the top of her head from what appeared to him a great distance. She seemed to have decreased. Not just in height, but in volume.

“Absolutely.”

“Oh. Okay. Good. You’re a trooper.”

“Absolutely,” she said.





26

Molly called her mother every day, which was admirable, Freddie thought, and often inconvenient, happening when they both got home from work and should, theoretically, have been talking to each other. Freddie called her father, of course, but not as frequently. Often, when she did call, he wasn’t in his room. He was a social person and he had found several of the ladies of Green Garden willing to be social with him. Her father was so social, Freddie told Joy, that the social worker at Green Garden seemed to devote a good portion of her working life to him. So when Freddie got a call from the social worker telling her that Duncan was feuding with a woman in a room down the hall, Freddie was not surprised.

“He’s become verbally abusive,” the social worker said.

“Oh, that.” Freddie breathed a sigh of relief. “Yes, he told me there’s a lady who shouts at him when he walks by her door.”

“His language is out of bounds.”

“Did he call her a crusty botch of nature? That was always one of his favorites.”

“I don’t think you understand how serious this is. It’s disturbing the entire facility.”

“But that’s from Troilus and Cressida.”

“It was very upsetting for Mrs. Barsky.”

“Mrs. Barsky?” Mrs. Barsky had been his regular dinner partner some weeks back. Now he was sharing his table with another lady. Freddie suggested to the social worker that this shift in dining companions might have something to do with the arguments, but the social worker kept coming back to her father’s elaborate curses.

“He called Mrs. Barsky the slander of her heavy mother’s womb and, let me see, I wrote it down somewhere, here it is: a swollen parcel of dropsies.”

“Henry the Fourth, Part I. You know that’s why I became a Shakespeare scholar? To keep up with him.”

“They’re revving up to kick him out. I can feel it,” she said later to Molly. “He’s making trouble again.”

“At least he enjoys himself.”

But when Molly spoke to Daniel that night, she said, “I know he has a good time, but still, I’m glad Mom’s not a sex maniac like Duncan. She’s so dignified. It does my heart good.”

“We’re lucky we have such a reasonable, levelheaded mother.”

“You’ve done so much, Daniel, to help her get to this point. Going over there every day and everything.”

“Well, so have you. You arranged for Wanda to stay on, you got the Life Alert, you took care of the banking stuff.”

They both smiled, thinking of their mother safe, clean, and comfortable in her apartment, her Life Alert wristband securely fastened.





27

Joy woke up and, as usual, Aaron was dead.

What was coming was clear to her, and it was a vast emptiness, a blank, much like the winter with its white horizon, dense and low, no distance to the sky at all. The emptiness was everywhere, in every room at every hour. She could feel it draining the life out of her until she, too, would be empty. In the shower, she cried because, there, no one could hear her, though she knew there was no one to hear her anywhere.