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

“You’re too far away,” Joy said.

“So are you,” Molly said, but she said it gently, and she meant it.

She also meant to visit every six weeks. It did not work out to be quite that often.

“Don’t come, don’t come, this is the worst winter we’ve ever had, it’s not even safe to go outside,” Joy told her, and Molly pretended she thought her mother meant what she said. She put off her visit for two weeks, three weeks, then a month. The snow fell in New York, then fell again. “The sidewalks are sheets of ice,” Joy would say. “Treacherous sheets of ice.” The weathermen warned the elderly to stay inside. It was too cold, too windy, too icy. “I went downstairs just to stick my nose out the door, just to get some fresh air, just a walk to the corner, but the doorman wouldn’t let me leave the building. Not one step. Far too dangerous.”

“The doorman takes better care of my parents than I do,” Molly said to Freddie one morning, a beautiful morning, the air brilliant and blue.

Freddie handed her a cup of coffee. “Thank god for those doormen.”

“My mother says she has cabin fever. You know, I couldn’t do anything about that even if I were there. I can’t change the weather. And she won’t come out here, even to visit, even for a week. Well, how could she? She can’t leave Daddy, and he certainly can’t come. So what good would I be there anyway if they can’t leave the house? I mean, I spend more time with my mother on the phone now than I ever did in person when I lived in the city.”

Molly was talking to herself, Freddie understood that, and she sat in the winter sunshine not quite listening. Her own father had a new girlfriend. It was causing ripples of resentment in the facility, and not only from his former girlfriends. The social worker seemed somehow offended, too. “They’re all over each other,” she’d said in the last call.

“Am I supposed to leave my job? Leave you? Leave my whole life?” Molly was saying. “Well, maybe she thinks since I did it once, I could do it again, just roll the film backward…”

“I don’t like the direction in which this monologue is going,” Freddie said. “I really don’t.”

“… Of course, that’s not what she wants, which is good, because it’s not going to happen, because how could I even get my old job back, and what job would you be able to get in New York…”

Freddie stopped listening again. It was indecent to intrude on such desperate thoughts. She tried not to worry that Molly might someday approach her with a serious plan to leave L.A. A few times when she had taken Molly at her word and thought the guilt outweighed everything else and suggested they move to New York, Molly had been horrified and said, “Can’t I feel guilty in peace?”

For Joy and Aaron, the months were long and cramped, though not without excitement. The apartment teemed with people in rubber gloves, and the atmosphere was pungent and gurgling with strange cuisines, sausages and beans, African pumpkin and foo-foo, fish heads floating in soup pots, chicken feet protruding from stews. Joy’s eyes burned from the spices in the air. She was afraid to look in the refrigerator.

She was still tired, more tired than she had ever imagined a person could be and still rise up and stand on two feet. Her hearing was going, too, she was sure of it. “I’m deef, Paw,” she said to Aaron, and he smiled because he knew he was expected to, not because he thought she was funny, she could tell. There were days when she was glad of losing her hearing, the babel of languages and the sounds of pain thereby muted and dulled. The cold and snow continued morning after morning, afternoons of snow dissolving into snowy nights. Joy and Aaron, trapped inside, migrated from one end of the apartment to the other and back. Aaron could no longer use a walker, and the one time they had tried to push his wheelchair in the snow, before the temperature really dropped, the wheelchair bucked and slid and crashed into a bank of snow.

The wind blew and iced branches fell. The sidewalks dwindled to slippery tracks. The days, short and dark, seemed endless. Joy wondered if Aaron suffered from choking claustrophobia, too. She couldn’t ask him. He no longer said more than a few stock phrases. For Joy, the way one indistinguishable hour ran into another was frightening. She came to cherish the arrivals and departures of Walter, Elvira, and Wanda. They were like the chimes of a clock, like church bells, dividing the day into its proper parts.

On one afternoon when the sun peeped out and the temperature rose to just below freezing, and Joy could stand the seclusion no more, she bundled Aaron up in a heavy sweater and the parka she’d gotten him on sale at McLaughlin’s, which looked so good on him.

“We have to get out of our cloister, Aaron. We are going to breathe some fresh air.”

She adjusted his cap, a tweed driving cap that did not cover his ears.

“Your big ears are going to freeze,” she said.

“Watch your language.” It was more than he had said in days, and Joy pulled off the hat and kissed his head.

“There.”

Sometimes she wanted to put her hands around his neck and squeeze the last lingering pretense of life out of him. More often, she wanted to bury not him but herself — bury herself in her down duvet and never show her face again. She missed him terribly.

She put on her warmest coat. Wanda pushed the wheelchair to the front door and Gregor made a fuss over them, shaking Aaron’s hand, then high-fiving him. Though the days of Aaron walking to the park with his little red wagon were gone, every cloud had its silver lining, that’s what they said, and Joy, unsteady and weak, took possession of the red walker herself for their outing.

“Won’t Coco be pleased, recycling and all,” she said to Aaron as she followed him out the door. She leaned down and whispered in his big ear, “I feel like the red caboose of the Old Jew train.” She turned to Gregor. “I’m the caboose,” she said.

“Good for you, Doctor,” Gregor said.

She often wondered if he thought she was a real doctor. He held the door and smiled and nodded encouragement.

The shock of the cold almost stopped her. The snow, banked up on the sidewalk, looked ponderous and old. But the sunlight and the sky, that blaze of blue sky, were miraculous after so many weeks of looking out the window at sky the color of an old nickel.

They turned into the park where Aaron had spent so many afternoons.

“Isn’t this nice?” Joy said. “Oh dear god, we’re free!”

Aaron, inside his heap of warm clothing, said nothing.

“Okay, Aaron.” She sighed, disappointed in spite of herself. “Have it your way.”

She sat on a bench blinking in the sunlight like a night creature.

“Koffee?” Wanda said.

Whenever Wanda said coffee, it seemed to Joy that the word began with a k .

“No,” she said. “Thank you, but I dare not.” Dare not. Where had that come from? A book she’d read? Her grandmother? Did all grandmothers use the same phrases no matter what era they lived in? “My digestion,” she added primly, as if Wanda did not know their digestive behavior, hers and Aaron’s, intimately.

“You go,” she said to Wanda. “Go get your koffee. I’ll watch Aaron.”

And that is what she did, gazing at him with the love of decades past and the angry exhaustion of a sleepless night and the terror of the days and nights to come.

I dare not think that way, she said to herself. I dare not.

The air smelled cold, but the sun gave the illusion of warmth. Snow that had piled on the bushes dripped, just a bit. It was almost like spring, which is just what the man approaching, pushing a familiar-looking red walker, said.