Percival Everett - Erasure

“Lisa keeps telling me that, but I can’t remember to change it.”

“Tell you what, I’ll pick up a new one for you.” As I said it, I wondered what kind of grief I might cause Lisa by buying Mother a new calendar. Would the old lady go on and on about where it came from? I could imagine the months peeling by and Lisa having to endure, Would you look at that picture of the Grand Canyon. Monksie gave me that calendar. He noticed that the old one was out of date.

“Here you go.” Mother set the teapot down between our cups, then sat. “So, how was your meeting?”

“Fine,” I said. “The paper went well and now I’m done.”

“That’s good,” she said. She got up and turned the dial of the burner to off a second time, then sat back down.

“You should be careful burning things in that fireplace,” I told her. “It’s never been used. The flue is probably stuck shut.”

“It did get sort of smoky in the living room.”

“You shouldn’t use it at all.”

“I’m finished burning the things anyway.” She poured the tea.

“What were you burning?” I asked.

“Just some papers. Your father gave me instructions when he was in the hospital. He said, ‘Agnes, please burn the papers in the gray box in my study. Will you do that for me?’ I told him I would and then he asked me to please not read them.”

“So, did you?”

Mother shook her head. “Your father asked me not to.”

I looked at the counter and saw a blue box sitting there. “You’re not burning the stuff in that box too, are you?”

“That’s what I burned. It did make the living room smoky. I never thought about the flue. That’s why we never had a fire in this house. Because I’m afraid of fire.”

“I knew that about you, Mother.”

“Oh, I didn’t offer you milk. Would you like some?”

“No thanks.” I blew on the tea and drank some. “So, are you meeting with your club much these days?”

“Not so much. They’re all dying off. Young women aren’t interested in bridge anymore.”

“From what I gathered you ladies never play bridge anyway.”

“Is that what you gathered?” She laughed softly. “I suppose that’s right.”

I looked at her eyes and could see the fatigue. “Maybe you should stretch out for a while.”

“I do feel a little tired. Lorraine’s making dinner tonight. We’ll eat at seven, but you can come at six for cocktails.”

“Okay, Mother.”

Anyone who speaks to members of his family knows that sharing a language does not mean you share the rules governing the use of that language. No matter what is said, something else is meant and I knew that for all my mother’s seeming incoherence or out-of-itness, she was trying to tell me something over tea. The way she had mentioned the smoke in the living room twice. Her calling the blue box gray. Her easy and quick capitulation to what it was she and her cronies actually did at their meetings. But since I didn’t know the rules, which were forever changing, I could only know that she was trying to say something, not what that something was.

For my father, the road had to wind uphill both ways and be as difficult as possible. Sadly, this was the sensibility he instilled in me when I set myself to the task of writing fiction. It wasn’t until I brought him a story that was purposely confusing and obfuscating that he seemed at all impressed and pleased. He said, smiling, “You made me work, son.” He once said to me in a museum, when I complained about an illegible signature on a painting, “You don’t sign it because you want people to know you painted it, but because you love it.” He was all wrong of course, but the sentiment was so beautiful that I wish to believe it now. What he might have been trying to say, I suppose, though he never would have even thought about it in these terms, was that art finds its form and that it is never a mere manifestation of life.

Lorraine had been the housekeeper since before I was born. She liked me as a child. She liked me as a young adult. But when she opened a book of mine and discovered the word fuck, she stopped liking me. From that point on she was polite, but curt, never overtly displeased by my presence, but clearly not anticipating any grief upon my departure. Lorraine, as far as I knew, never had a life away from my family. She had days off, but I didn’t know where she went, if she went anywhere. She even went with us to the beach in the summers. But she was not our nanny. If we had a problem, we went to Mother. If we needed rides someplace, we went to Mother. If we needed food or clean clothes, we went to Lorraine.

“Good evening, Mr. Monk,” she said as I entered the house with my sister.

“How are you, Lorraine?” I asked.

“Getting older every day.”

“You don’t look it,” I said.

“Thank you.”

Lisa took my jacket to hang in the closet as if I were a real visitor. I looked at the house again. I had loved the house as a kid. It was a large two-story with many rooms and nooks and a finished basement apartment in which Lorraine resided. But it now seemed cold, despite how high the heat was turned. The drapes covering the windows were heavy, the wood of the stairway bannister and door jambs dark and somber.

“Mrs. E is already at the table,” Lorraine told us and led us into the dining room as if we didn’t know the way.

Mother remained seated when we entered. Her eyes were red and weak. We leaned to kiss her and she patted our cheeks.

“Are you feeling okay, Mother?” Lisa asked.

“She missed her nap today, Dr. Lisa,” Lorraine said.

We sat on either side of our mother. I poured the wine and Mother waved it off.

“Did you take your medication?” Lisa asked.

“I did. All three thousand pills.” Mother fanned her off the subject. “How was your meeting?” she asked me, having forgotten our earlier conversation.

“It’s over, that’s the important part.”

“You presented a paper?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“On?”

“Just some stuff about novels and literary criticism. Dry, boring, meaningless stuff. I actually just came to see you.”

“That’s my sweetheart, Monksie. But why aren’t you staying here with me?”

“Since I am at the conference, I need to be near the proceedings.” I looked at my sister. “I did go down to Lisa’s clinic earlier. She’s really doing good work.”

“She’s just like her father.” By the way she said it, it was not clear it was a good thing. Then she aked me, “Are you still driving that station wagon?”

“Yes, Mother.”

Lorraine came in with the dinner. The roast beef was lean. The broccoli and cauliflower were overcooked and the grains of rice were so separate and distinct that it was near impossible to pick them up with a fork. Lorraine came in a couple of times to check on us.

Lisa put down her fork and picked up her wine glass, held it over her plate without drinking. “Mother, I’ve been going over the books and I believe you’re going to have to sell Father’s office. The upkeep is costing so much that the rent is meaningless.”

“That was your father’s office.”

“Yes, Mother. You’ve got the other properties,” Lisa said.

“Your father started out in that office in nineteen fifty. You weren’t born yet. Bill was just a year old.”

“Well, I’m putting the office up for sale. It’s something we have to do.” Lisa was tugging at the corners of her napkin, a tic she’d had since childhood.