They May Not Mean To, But They Do(62)

Joy watched him blandly. “You think you can scare me with a little pee? Think again, dog. I’ve been worked over by an expert. With a colostomy bag.”

She wiped up the dog pee. She mourned her husband. She mourned her life, which seemed so far away, lost in time. She longed for her daughter and her son, the sounds of their voices, the strength of their arms, and the loving condescension of their hearts. She longed for Aaron.

She didn’t seem to belong anywhere anymore. But it was good to be home just the same.

*

“Promise you’ll call me every day and tell me how you’re doing,” Molly had said before Joy left.

Joy took her promise to heart. She called every day, eagerly, hesitant to disturb Molly, but not hesitant enough to stop dialing. Sometimes she called twice a day, sometimes more. It was dangerous to call so much, signaling need and helplessness, she knew that. She made sure to sound happy and engaged, made sure to share only what bits of information she believed shed a pleasant light on her and her days. The deliveryman from the coffee shop looked cold, she told Molly, so she gave him one of Aaron’s scarves, he was so grateful.

“Mom, it’s June. How could he be?”

“The point, Molly, is how nice it is to be able to make a gesture like that and have it mean something to someone.”

“Which scarf? I hope not the gray cashmere.”

Joy tried to monitor her voice and conversation, to weed out any petulance and grievance of tone, but it was difficult. No matter how hard she listened to herself and monitored herself, what she heard was an indolent, wide-ranging, rolling report of the minutiae of a disgruntled old woman’s existence: the chronology of meals, of courses within meals, the digestive consequences of meals; the frequency of sleep and sleeplessness, the details of other phone calls, phone calls with people Molly did not even know. She couldn’t change the course of her words, they rushed along like a flooded river. She talked about her grandchildren and their bad colds, but also the grandchildren of friends and neighbors with colds that were even worse. Those grandchildren, the grandchildren of friends and neighbors, had cousins, too, whose troubles and triumphs she found herself confiding to Molly. Her voice droned on and she was mesmerized by it, helpless to stop, unwilling to hang up. Not that long ago she had been lying on Molly and Freddie’s couch watching television, her daughter giving her a foot massage, and Joy had been longing to be alone with her loneliness. Now she experienced every phone call to Molly as essential, something she could not let slip away.

“I take the dog out every day.”

“Yes, you told me, that’s great for you, to get out.”

“I still have to carry him. It’s good he only weighs a few pounds. I’m not as strong as I once was. But yesterday it was so windy the doorman, that nice Ernie who Daddy liked so much, he wouldn’t let me out the door. I called the hardware store, Feldman’s, the one with all the tchotchkes, and they suggested Wee-Wee pads, but I had to call a pet store to get them. My neighbor upstairs, the man who was always such a sourpuss until he got his poodle, well, he gave me a number, left it with the doorman, actually, and I called…”

“Mom? I’m sorry, but I’m in the middle of cooking dinner. I really should get off the phone.”

“Oh! The time difference. And why am I rattling on like this? It’s a mild form of senility. Good night, sweetheart.”

“I wish Mom would get hearing aids,” Daniel told Molly after one of his own conversations with their mother.

But Molly didn’t think it would make much difference. Their mother wanted to talk, not to listen. It was an exhalation of words, no intake of breath, no pauses, a stream of consciousness into which no one else could dip a toe, an incompleteness so complete there could be no natural end to a conversation. Molly often found these monologues strangely soothing. She wondered if that was what meditation was all about, that absence of meaning, that sense of eternity. She was almost as helpless in that cocoon of superfluous information as her mother. The truth was, she craved the sound of her mother’s voice. It calmed her, reassured her. Ah yes, the twins’ First Communion. Whose twins? she would wonder idly. But it didn’t matter. They were the twins created by her mother’s voice, created by her mother.

There was little chance for Molly to interrupt, and she stopped trying. She did not say, for example, I miss Daddy at the oddest times. She missed him whenever the fog came in. He used to quote Carl Sandburg when there was fog, little cat feet, silent haunches. She missed him when she made gravy because he hated giblets, or when she made lima beans because he hated lima beans, or pea soup because he loved pea soup. She missed him when she got an ingrown toenail and cut a V in the nail the way he’d taught her. She rarely had a chance to say any of that to her mother, and the few times she tried, she felt intrusive and loud. She didn’t say much and she didn’t listen carefully. Her mother’s voice washed over her, intoxicating.

“Until I can’t stand it anymore.”

“Well, an hour on the phone is a lot,” Freddie said sympathetically.

“It’s no skin off your nose,” Molly said. “Why do you care?”

Freddie shook her head and laughed. “You’re impossible.”

“A hundred years ago we would have had to write letters, which would have taken days to get across the country. And I would not have heard her voice. I love her voice. I love to hear it. Until I can’t stand it anymore! And then I hang up, and then I miss her and want to listen to her talk more.”