“I do. They’re really very family-oriented. They understand absolutely that I have to take time off to do things for my mother. I used to work at an interior-design store, and I still sew. I’ve just finished some starfish costumes for a friend’s third-grade class.”
“Jack Milrus thinks your mother might benefit from being in assisted living.”
“I know, but he doesn’t know—he really doesn’t know—what it’s like to approach my mother about anything.”
“What is the worst thing that might happen if you did approach your mother?”
“The worst thing? My mother turns any subject to the other family, and whatever I want is just caught up in the whirlwind of complexity of this thing I won’t acknowledge, which is my father’s previous life, and, you know, she omits my brother from any discussion because she thinks he’s a ten-year-old child.”
“You feel frustrated.”
“Is there any other way to feel?”
“You could say to yourself, ‘My mother has had a stroke and has certain confusions that I can’t do anything about.’ ”
“You don’t understand. It is absolutely necessary that I acknowledge this other family. If I don’t, I’ve lost all credibility.”
The therapist shifts in her seat. “May I make a suggestion?” she says. “This is your mother’s problem, not yours. You understand something that your mother, whose brain has been affected by a stroke, cannot understand. Just as you would guide a child, who does not know how to function in the world, you are now in a position where—whatever your mother believes—you must nevertheless do what is best for her.”
“You need a vacation,” Jack Milrus says. “If I weren’t on call this weekend, I’d suggest that you and Donna and I go up to Washington and see that show at the Corcoran where all the figures walk out of the paintings.”
“I’m sorry I keep bothering you with this. I know I have to make a decision. It’s just that when I went back to look at the Oaks and that woman had mashed an éclair into her face—”
“It’s funny. Just look at it as funny. Kids make a mess. Old people make a mess. Some old biddy pushed her nose into a pastry.”
“Right,” I say, draining my gin-and-tonic. We are in his backyard. Inside, Donna is making her famous osso buco. “You know, I wanted to ask you something. Sometimes she says ‘desperate.’ She uses the word when you wouldn’t expect to hear it.”
“Strokes,” he says.
“But is she trying to say what she feels?”
“Does it come out like a hiccup or something?” He pulls up a weed.
“No, she just says it, instead of another word.”
He looks at the long taproot of the dandelion he’s twisted up. “The South,” he says. “These things have a horribly long growing season.” He drops it in a wheelbarrow filled with limp things raked up from the yard. “I am desperate to banish dandelions,” he says.
“No, she wouldn’t use it like that. She’d say something like, ‘Oh, it was desperate of you to ask me to dinner.’ ”
“It certainly was. You weren’t paying any attention to me on the telephone.”
“Just about ready!” Donna calls out the kitchen window. Jack raises a hand in acknowledgment. He says, “Donna’s debating whether to tell you that she saw Vic and Banderas having a fight near the dog park. Vic was knocking Banderas on the snout with a baseball cap, Donna says, and Banderas had squared off and was showing teeth. Groceries all over the street.”
“I’m amazed. I thought Banderas could do no wrong.”
“Well, things change.”
In the yard next door, the neighbor’s strange son faces the street lamp and, excruciatingly slowly, begins his many evening sun salutations.
Cora, my brother’s friend, calls me at midnight. I am awake, watching
“Tim thinks that he and I should do our share and have Mom here for a vacation, which we could do in November, when the college has a reading break,” Cora says. “I would move into Tim’s condominium, if it wouldn’t offend Mom.”
“That’s nice of you,” I say. “But you know that she thinks Tim is ten years old? I’m not sure that she’d be willing to fly to Ohio to have a ten-year-old take care of her.”
“What?”
“Tim hasn’t told you about this? He wrote her a letter, recently, and she saved it to show me how good his penmanship was.”
“Well, when she gets here she’ll see that he’s a grown-up.”
“She might think it’s a Tim impostor, or something. She’ll talk to you constantly about our father’s first family.”
“I still have some Ativan from when a root canal had to be redone,” Cora says.
“Okay, look—I’m not trying to discourage you. But I’m also not convinced that she can make the trip alone. Would Tim consider driving here to pick her up?”
“Gee. My nephew is eleven, and he’s been back and forth to the West Coast several times.”
“I don’t think this is a case of packing snacks in her backpack and giving her a puzzle book for the plane,” I say.
