They May Not Mean To, But They Do(45)

She had begun timing herself in the morning to see how long it took her to get dressed.

“It feels like two hours, and it is.”

Sometimes she didn’t bother to get dressed.

“It saves so much time. Some days I don’t even want to take a shower, but then I think, Well! I’ll do it for my children. I don’t want them to have a filthy old mother with fuzzy gray hair.”

“You’re funny,” Molly always said, laughing, relieved—Joy could hear it in her voice. That was another of the responsibilities Joy had, relieving her children of worry. She did not want them to be upset. And she did not want them to send her to an assisted-living facility in Cincinnati. Or anywhere else.





32

Joy looked out her window and felt an affinity for the ugly March street and the ugly March sky. Even her heart felt ugly, especially her heart, dusty and empty except for the shaky memories scattered around like sticks of broken furniture. She was physically ugly, too, listless skin sagging at her jaw, red-rimmed eyes—she examined her face in the mirror and took a certain satisfaction in its fall from beauty. It was the only power she seemed to have anymore—the power to deteriorate. Her hair was too long, too thin, scraggly and white like a witch’s hair, and there was a long white hair on her chin. Her clothes, which had once charmed and fascinated her, now sulked in the closet, a closet that had no light. She tried a flashlight. It was too heavy for her, twisting her wrist so painfully she grabbed at the doorframe to keep her balance. Everything was too heavy for her these days, even the clothes themselves. Those she extracted were random and old, decades old. Excellent quality, she could still appreciate that. Pity they didn’t fit, pity about the moth holes, pity about so many things. She lost weight, something that automatically pleased her, until she remembered that she’d lost the weight because of illness, stress, old age. Her good Italian knit pants fell right down to her feet, like a clown’s pants in the circus, like Aaron’s pants, a thought that made her sit on the edge of the bed, that made the room spin. Usually she ended up wearing the same gray sweatshirt, the one Aaron had worn, and a pair of black jersey pants she’d gotten at the Gap, although the drawstring was tied in an inextricable knot.

She sat at the table not even bothering to look at the car lights outside. Lou Barney, Lou Barney, who the hell was Lou Barney? The iPad only wanted to play Lou Barney, flashing his name on the screen. Joy had never heard of him. Why did Molly and Danny ever get her this thing? It was very generous of them, but it always wanted to play Lou Barney, and then wouldn’t even play him, whoever he was. Joy shook the iPad. She was just about to call Molly when she decided to try one more time. She changed glasses and tapped the screen.

It wasn’t Lou Barney. It was Low Battery.

I really cannot take much more of the modern world, she thought. I really cannot.

Soon after Lou Barney, Molly came for a week, by herself. Joy was still coughing, but the bronchitis was mostly gone. She had not gotten pneumonia.

“That’s wonderful, Mom. You look so much better than I expected. You’re so independent.”

Joy said, Yes, I am. She did not say, Thank god you’re here, Molly, I could not have taken one more minute on my own, I’m so weak I can hardly lift my toothbrush.

She took a walk with Molly and tried not to lean on her arm.

“Mom? Are you okay? You look a little pale.”

“It’s the weather,” Joy said.

Molly took her arm gently. “I’m glad you’ve taken such good care of yourself.”

“Danny did what he could,” Joy said. “And now you’re here.”

She felt Molly stiffen, for just a split second. Then Molly stopped and wrapped her arms around her. Joy’s face was pressed uncomfortably against the zipper of her daughter’s coat.

“I don’t want to be a burden,” Joy said.

Molly laughed. “I should hope not.”

It was about a month later that Joy was finally able to force herself to go back to work. She took a cane. Her bags seemed heavier than ever, but the weather was better, no snow, no rain, just a vicious wind. Gregor got her a cab. She immediately began to worry about whether she’d be able to get a cab home. It would be too windy to wait for the bus even with the cane. The cane had four little feet and a dirty white stripe where someone had torn off the adhesive tape on which the name Aaron Bergman had been scrawled in black Sharpie. I should have gotten him a nicer cane, she thought. How could I have let him walk around with this?

She typed some figures into the computer. The screen shuddered and suddenly there was something different on it. What had she done?

What had she done? What was she doing? Why was she here? These were vast questions that had become horribly small and specific to her. It was hard to remember exactly what she had done earlier in the day. It was hard to focus on what she was doing at that moment. It was hard to understand why she was in this windowless, airless closet.

She tried to concentrate on the report on the air quality necessary for new display cases. She pulled a bottle of water from one of her bags, but she could not unscrew the cap. She glanced at a study of formaldehyde in enclosed environments. She wondered if she was breathing formaldehyde in the enclosed environment that was her office.

She leaned back and looked up. There were several missing ceiling tiles near the light, as well as some wires left hanging from a wall socket. She had filled out all the forms for maintenance, but then she’d been told it would take weeks for anyone to get to it. “Volatile Organic Compounds,” she typed, a term for hydrocarbon gases.