Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

"No one's being ravished, OK? Here. Do me a favor. Can you just slow down a minute? Sit back and relax. Close your eyes and breathe deeply. Would you do that?"

"Don't talk to me like I'm crazy! I am your mother, T.!"

"Of course you are. And I'm your son and I'm worried about you."

She looked at him blinking, and he thought she was considering his words until he noticed she was not looking at him but over his shoulder.

"And what is that?"

He turned and followed her gaze. It was a pencil sketch by a famous expressionist. He had bought it at a Sotheby's auction.

"It's art, Mother."

"Don't be ridiculous."

But she seemed mollified, and began to pack her personal items back into her purse.

"Let me take you to my place, OK? I'll make you dinner."

"I'm not hungry."

"Then maybe just a cup of tea."

"I'm not an invalid, you know. I'm just a woman whose husband walked out the door. For all I know he's doing it with his secretary."

"He took early retirement. He doesn't have a secretary."

"You know what I mean. Some random floozy."

"Let's just go, OK? Let's talk about this when you're rested."

"And I don't need to stay with you. I made my own arrangements. I have a room in a four-star hotel."

"Well, I need you to stay. Come on. Come home with me.

Weeks later she was still in his guest bedroom. He did not always mind and was even glad, at times, that she was there, but in terms of progress her presence threatened to reduce him. She was a liability.

He liked to present himself as solitary and free, an argument for potential; he moved and spoke with the official neutrality of a man sprung fully formed from the background of commerce. But now suddenly he carried personal freight, which threatened to hold him back. He cringed at the thought of business associates encountering his mother, whether by design or accident. He did not want his investors, for instance, to think of him beholden to a mother, childlike. And she was bad for his image, far too frail and specific to reflect the broadness of his interests and his command of prospects.

The most austere among his investors, in fact, the ones who had wide ocean views out their office windows, gave the impression of never having been born at all. They would die, admittedly, that much was tacitly conceded; but this was understood to be almost a polite gesture on their part, part of a genteel tradition whereby the old bowed out into the wings to make room for the young.

So they would die, when their race was run, but they had never been born: they had not been children. They had not ever been anything but what they were now. And he would not make the concession either.

Still his mother was pathetic, hurt and lonely. He could not bring himself to hurt her further.

When he was at the office she walked the dog three times a day; arriving home he found his laundry washed and folded, shirts hung in the closet by color, mail carefully sorted. She busied herself with the housework usually done by the cleaning woman, and when for the first time since his mother's arrival the cleaning woman arrived and let herself in she found a screaming middle-aged blonde in a kaftan and every surface spotless.

His mother rearranged dry goods and crockery and occupied herself changing drawer liners and purchasing items for which he had no use, such as fondue forks and silver napkin rings. In corners of his apartment things sprang tip that bore no relation to him. On the toilet tank, a china shepherdess with rouged cheeks and a crook and a curly-haired lamb at her feet; on a wall in the foyer, a framed picture of angels accompanied by a homily; on the arms of a leather sofa, elaborate lace sleeves.

"I don't remember," he mused over dinner on the day the shepherdess appeared, "you decorating our house this way when I was growing tip."

"What way?" asked his mother.

She insisted on cooking for him every night; the meals were low-fat and almost completely devoid of flavor. He had taken to eating a fast-food hamburger on his way home from the office.

"You know — the thing you put in the bathroom, the Little Bo Peep thing."

"You don't like it?" asked his mother, her spoon suspended halfway to her lips, trembling.

He heard something in her tone and noticed her eyes were brimming.

"It's not that," he said hastily. "I wouldn't have picked it out myself, per se, is all I meant."

"You needed somewhere to put the guest soaps," she said, and resumed eating. "You can't expect guests to use the same soap you use. It's not hygienic."

"What the hell good is soap if it's not hygienic?"

"You get your germs on it. Or from shaving. A hair could stick to it."

"I appreciate all your efforts," he said. "I love having you here, and I know the dog does too. But maybe you should focus on yourself, for once. You know? There are good day spas in walking distance. Susan made tip a list for you. Or you could take one of those weekend cruises to the Catalinas."

"When will you stop treating me like the walking wounded, T.? I'm fine. I like to keep busy."

"I realize. But I think you've been looking after someone, two people, right? — for the last twenty years of your life…"

"Twenty-three. Thirty-three if you count from when we got married, which you probably should. That man hasn't ironed his own shirts since 1963."

". . and maybe you need to stop looking after other people and look after yourself. Concentrate on what you want, what you need. Because my guest soap is, let's face it, not yet at the level of a national emergency."

"You don't like it, do you? It's an antique. It is Dresden china, T. From Dresden, Germany."

"Mother? I'm not entirely sure you're listening to me."

"They're famous for their china. Wonderful workmanship. Little blue marks… I may be alone, my husband may have left me, but I know how lucky I am, T. At least I know that."

"I'm sure-"

"You know what we did to Dresden in 1945? Your father had friends who were pilots in the air war. And some of them-we're talking about boys who were eighteen years old here, T., barely out of puberty who still had facial acne-they talked about trying them as war criminals. Their superiors told them they had to bomb Dresden, so they did. Some of them were shot down. They still had facial acne."

She gazed at him balefully.

"You know what happened with the carpet bombing? There were fires that burned at fifteen hundred degrees. The cold air rushed in from outside and all the people got sucked into the flames and burned to death in terrible agony. Those were someone's friends, T. Their friends and their families. They had friends and someone was friends with them. Someone lost their friends then."

"Uh…"

"Hundreds of thousands of someone's friends burned to death then, screaming."

He tried to catch her eye but she picked up a salt shaker.

"They were someone's friends and they saw right out of their eyes, like you do. They watched things pass, there was nothing they could do about the world. Nothing they could ever do."

"Are you — "

"And what did they get for wanting? They wanted the world to be different, T. You can be sure of that. They wanted the world to be a good place, fall of holiness and wonder. We all do."

" It»

"But what did they get? They got burning to death."

"Lis-"

"They got watching their children burn. Their children and their babies. Babies, T. Little children, toddlers holding their toys, babies with those wide eyes… mothers had to watch their children die right in front of them, trapped in the burning buildings. Children die faster than adults. And their mothers had to watch it. Choking from smoke inhalation while they burned to death. Hundreds and thousands of babies. Watching them cry that sweet baby cry as their little faces burned away to a crisp."