Cathleen Schine - They May Not Mean To, But They Do

Molly thought, He moves like an old Chinese man on a hill doing tai chi, dignified in the dawn. His expression was serene, self-possessed. But Molly knew he was merely distracted, constantly distracted.

“Wake up,” she said. “What are we going to do, Daniel? About Them?”

He shook his head. What, indeed? “I do come up to the apartment every Saturday,” he said. “And I bring the girls, too, sometimes. We go to a museum first and then come for dinner. Mom never wants to come with us to any of the museums, though. She doesn’t like to leave Dad, although all he does is sleep in front of the TV. I’ve tried to get him to go in a taxi and then a wheelchair, but he never wants to. Neither of them is very cooperative. They would have such a good time, watching Ruby sketch — she loves Picasso.”

“She would love Picasso,” Molly said, laughing. “But walking around museums at this point…”

“Cora is so into the minerals at the Museum of Natural History. Not just the ones that look like jewels. I think she has a scientific bent…”

“Come on, Daniel. She’s eight. She likes rocks. Which I think is fantastic, I like rocks, too. But what are we going to do when they let Dad out of the hospital? Mommy can’t take care of him anymore.”

“I don’t want them to be old,” Daniel said.

“The alternative and all that…”

“Maybe.”

“We can’t put pillows over their faces.”

“No,” Daniel said. “We would miss them too much.”

Joy went to work the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. She was expected, and if she was honest with herself, she could not stand another day sitting in the hospital with Aaron.

The museum was in the process of moving to a new building that week. The little neighborhood museum devoted to preserving a small, vibrant, gritty slice of New York life, the life of pushcarts and sweatshops and vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley, was moving into a new building in a different part of town. It was going to be incorporated into a larger organization, to become a section of the City University system, where there would be more room, more money, more prestige. It was as if the drab middle-aged museum had snagged a rich dentist.

“Dr. Bergman! There you are.” The new director was a nervous, suspicious woman with a heart-shaped face instead of a heart, that’s what Joy had told Aaron, and he’d laughed. She usually introduced herself as Miss Georgia, as if she were a beauty pageant winner. “Out with the old, in with the new,” Miss Georgia was known to say. It was her mandate. It had to do with grants.

“Packed up and ready to go?” she said when she saw Joy. “The new year approaches. The movers wait for no man.”

Then, like a schoolmarm or a politician or the Wicked Witch of the West, she shook her finger in Joy’s face.

Joy, a little taken aback, recovered and jauntily waved her finger in Miss Georgia’s face in response.

By Wednesday, they were in the new building.

“It’s big and bulky and it’s cement, it’s sort of like being inside an inverted swimming pool,” she told Aaron. She smoothed his hospital gown. “There are no windows that I can see. The stairs were made by giants for giants. And inside, I couldn’t decide whether I was about to be overcome by claustrophobia or agoraphobia. Help! I wanted to say. I’m just an old lady looking for my cabinet of old tchotchkes.”

Her new department was called City Collections.

“Like a sanitation-truck company,” she said to Aaron.

She had arrived at the new building out of breath and a little confused. Her bags were heavy and she tilted noticeably to the left. Lopsided or not, she thought, here I come.

“But this is a closet,” she said when Miss Georgia showed Joy her new office.

“A storage room,” the director corrected her. “But it will do nicely. Look at all the … storage.”

The narrow, windowless room was lined by expensive-looking built-in file cabinets. There was also a table, very white and modern, and a rather worn gray chair on casters.

“But I do need a desk,” Joy said. “I mean, after all, a person needs a desk.”

“But that is your desk,” the director said, pointing to the table.

“But it has no drawers. There isn’t even a drawer for a pencil.”

“Perhaps you have a nice mug,” the director said, patting the table encouragingly. “For your pencil.”

“Do you think they’re trying to get rid of me?” Joy said to Aaron. “I don’t think they can fire me for being old, so they’ll just torment me, right? Until I leave of my own free will.”

She spooned some ice cream into his mouth.

“They’ll see how easy it is to get rid of me,” she said. “They’re in for a surprise, aren’t they, Aaron?”

* * *

Aaron was prescribed various painkillers that teenagers in shrinking Midwestern towns abused. But when asked what the pain was from, the doctors were as canny and cautious as politicians. Molly wanted to shake them. Tell us what is wrong so we can fix it , she wanted to say. He is suffering. And I have to get back to L.A. to teach. She bombarded the doctors with direct questions, but the doctors always managed not to answer directly. Aaron had bladder cancer — they would concede that much, but everyone already knew that much. Heart failure, colon cancer, bladder cancer, Alzheimer’s. Yes, yes, but what was causing this pain?

“Daddy wants a pastrami sandwich,” Joy said, coming out of Aaron’s hospital room. “Honey, did you hear me?”

Molly had just asked the resident how long her father had to live. The resident said he could die tomorrow. Or not. He could live for a year. Or not. Or more. Or not.

“New York pastrami!” the resident said. “Good sign. A man with an appetite.”

In fact, Aaron had eaten nothing but a spoonful of ice cream in days, and when Molly arrived with the sandwich, he said there was a disgusting smell in the room, waved his big hand at her, and made her take it away.

She took the pastrami sandwich, which she had gone all the way to Zabar’s to get, to the cafeteria and split it with her mother and brother.

“It shouldn’t go to waste,” Joy said.

“That doctor said Daddy could come home in a day or two,” Molly said.

Joy wagged her head noncommittally.

“So we have to think about that.”

“You do need some help, Mom,” Daniel said. “Maybe someone to live in. Just for a while.”

“Molly’s here.”

Molly said slowly, clearly, “‘Help’ as in ‘You can’t get good help these days,’ not help as in ‘My daughter is a great help.’”

“And Molly has to leave on Friday.”

“I’ll cope,” Joy said. “I always have.”

“And when you’re at work? Do you want Daddy crawling down Park Avenue with no pants on? He needs someone to watch him.”

Joy sensed that Molly was right, but she wondered if it was necessary for Molly to bark at her like that. It was certainly expeditious, that bark, for even when Molly was not right, people tended to listen to her. But not this time, Joy thought. “I’m not sending him to a home,” she said. “Period.”

“Maybe we can get a nurse’s aide to come in,” Daniel said.

“I don’t want those people in my house. A different person every day … strangers snooping around.”

“But it would be so ‘cosmopolitan,’” Molly said, her voice full of sarcasm.

“What are you, sixteen years old, Molly? Give me a break.”

Molly did not give her a break, how could she? “You have to hire someone, whatever it costs. What have you been saving for all these years? A rainy day? This is the rainy day.”

Daniel said, “If it’s the money—”