My mother has a million friends. She keeps the greeting-card industry in business. She would probably send greetings on Groundhog Day, if the cards existed. Also, no one ever seems to disappear from her life (with the notable exception of my father). She still exchanges notes with a maid who cleaned her room at the Swift House Inn fifteen years ago—and my parents were only there for the weekend.
I know I should be grateful that she is such a friendly person. Many of my friends bemoan the fact that their parents get into altercations with everybody, or that they won’t socialize at all.
So: I flew from New York to Fort Myers, took the shuttle to the rental-car place, got in the car and was gratified that the air-conditioning started to blow the second I turned on the ignition, and leaned back, closed my eyes, and counted backward, in French, from thirty, in order to unwind before I began to drive. I then put on loud music, adjusted the bass, and set off, feeling around on the steering wheel to see if there was cruise control, because if I got one more ticket my insurance was going to be canceled. Or maybe I could get my mother to write a nice note pleading my case.
Anyway, all the preliminaries to my story are nothing but that: the almost inevitable five minutes of hard rain midway through the trip; the beautiful bridge; the damned trucks expelling herculean farts. I drove to Venice, singing along with Mick Jagger about beasts of burden. When I got to my mother’s street, which is, it seems, the only quarter-mile-long stretch of America watched directly by God, through the eyes of a Florida policeman in a radar-equipped car, I set the cruise control for twenty and coasted to her driveway.
Hot as it was, my mother was outside, sitting in a lawn chair flanked by pots of red geraniums. Seeing my mother always puts me into a state of confusion. Whenever I first see her, I become disoriented.
“Ann!” she said. “Oh, are you exhausted? Was the flight terrible?”
It’s the subtext that depresses me: the assumption that to arrive anywhere you have to pass through hell. In fact, you do. I had been on a USAir flight, seated in the last seat in the last row, and every time suitcases thudded into the baggage compartment my spine reverberated painfully. My traveling companions had been an obese woman with a squirming baby and her teenage son, whose ears she squeezed when he wouldn’t settle down, producing shrieks and enough flailing to topple my cup of apple juice. I just sat there silently, and I could feel that I was being too quiet and bringing everyone down.
My mother’s face was still quite pink. Shortly before my father’s death, after she had a little skin cancer removed from above her lip, she went to the dermatologist for microdermabrasion. She was wearing the requisite hat with a wide brim and Ari Onassis sunglasses. She had on her uniform: shorts covered with a flap, so that it looked as if she were wearing a skirt, and a T-shirt embellished with sequins. Today’s featured a lion with glittering black ears and, for all I knew, a correctly colored nose. Its eyes, which you might think would be sequins, were painted on. Blue.
“Love you,” I said, hugging her. I had learned not to answer her questions. “Were you sitting out here in the sun waiting for me?”
She had learned, as well, not to answer mine. “We can have lemonade,” she said. “Paul Newman. And that man’s marinara sauce—I never cook it myself anymore.”
The surprise came almost immediately, just after she pressed a pile of papers into my hands: thank-you notes from friends she wanted me to read; a letter she didn’t understand regarding a magazine subscription that was about to expire; an ad she’d gotten about a vacuum cleaner she wanted my advice about buying; two tickets to a Broadway play she’d bought ten years before that she and my father had never used (what was being asked of me?); and—most interesting, at the bottom of the pile—a letter from Drake Dreodadus, her neighbor, asking her to move in with him. “Go for the vacuum instead,” I said, trying to laugh it off.
“I’ve already made my response,” she said. “And you may be very surprised to know what I said.”
Drake Dreodadus had spoken at my father’s memorial service. Before that, I had met him only once, when he was going over my parents’ lawn with a metal detector. But no: as my mother reminded me, I’d had a conversation with him in the drugstore, one time when she and I stopped in to buy medicine for my father. He was a pharmacist.
“The only surprising thing would be if you’d responded in the affirmative,” I said.
“ ‘Responded in the affirmative!’ Listen to
“Mom,” I said, “tell me this is not something you’d give a second of thought to.”
“Several
“Mom,” I said, “you’re joking, right?”
“You’ll like him when you get to know him,” she said.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “This is someone you hardly know—or am I being naive?”
