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

“They love you,” the man said.

“I’m going to stay with my daughter. In California.” She did not mention Freddie. Perhaps that was wrong, but she could not come up with a way to explain Freddie, not on the spur of the moment to the wheelchair man.

“That’s beautiful,” said the man.

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

Danny set off the beeping alarms as he went through security.

“Hips,” he said apologetically to the guard. “And knees.”

“I am free of prosthetics,” Joy said. “I am also free of most of my large bowel, my gallbladder, my uterus, ovaries, and appendix. I have my tonsils and most of my teeth. Check on your machine. You’ll see. Go ahead, check.”

When she had been in Los Angeles for three days, she knew two things for certain. One: she could not spend two months with her daughter. Two: she could not spend two months with her daughter in California. The California sun was blinding, much brighter than the friendly East Coast sun. This sun was used to shining on a desert, harsh and unrelenting.

“Isn’t it beautiful, Mom? Do you see why I love it here?”

“Very nice,” Joy said.

Then there was Molly herself, as bright and unrelenting as the sun. Every time Joy put a glass down, Molly picked it up and put it in the dishwasher. The temperature was constantly shifting, depending on where that sun was and at what angle it was hitting the house, and Joy put on and took off sweaters all day long, but each time she reached for a sweater she had removed, it was gone, gone to its closet, hung up there by Molly. Books, magazines, sandwiches — they disappeared practically from Joy’s hand. Her toothbrush, which she left on the side of the sink, immediately hid itself in the medicine cabinet. Sometimes, when Joy lifted her coffee cup, a hand with a sponge swiped the spot where it had been on the table before Joy was able to take a sip.

“This is so relaxing, isn’t it, Mom?”

“Very nice.”

“Are you comfortable, Mommy? We got you a memory foam pad for the bed.”

The two girls were so thoughtful, but the bed was so high Joy had trouble getting into it. It loomed before her at night, a great bulbous affair piled with pillows, six, seven, eight pillows. The box spring and mattress and memory foam mattress pad and the down mattress pad on top of that looked like a big billowy hat that might topple off its head at any moment. It might cushion the fall in an earthquake. Then she thought, Earthquake, and could not sleep.

The jasmine bloomed, and it made her eyes water.

She uttered not a word of complaint. Molly was so happy to have her. Even Freddie seemed happy to have her here. Were they insane, both of them? She was a nuisance. Even at her best these days, she was a nuisance.

“I’m very annoying,” she said.

“No, you’re not,” said Molly.

“No, I am. I really am. I’m annoying. I annoy myself, even.”

Molly laughed and hugged her. Joy, hugging her back, felt the sturdy flesh of Molly’s back. “You certainly are strong.”

Molly rolled up her sleeve and made a muscle, like a man. Joy dutifully touched her daughter’s biceps and wondered when it was that muscles on women had become fashionable. “Okay, Popeye,” she said.

Molly was heading out for a walk. She walked very fast and very far every day. Stop and smell the roses, Joy had said once, but Molly said the roses in California did not have much smell.

“I’ll walk you to the gate.” Pretty much all she did. There were no doormen to gossip with, no coffee shop to walk to, no park, no friends to have lunch with, no Karl to bump into. “Just let me find my sunglasses.”

She looked first through one bag, then through another bag. As she pushed the packages of Kleenex and lipsticks and tubes of moisturizer aside, she began to panic. Her sunglasses had to be in her pocketbook, in this brown eyeglass case perhaps, but no, the brown one was empty, and this one, the turquoise, held her reading glasses, the old ones that worked better than the new ones, she had been searching for them all day, and another glasses case, a hard case, white, this had to be the one with the sunglasses, but these were a pair of glasses she had never seen before, where on earth had they come from?

“Here, Mom. I found them. They were in the pocket of your jacket. In the closet.”

“Oh thank god. Now I’ll just put my shoes on.”

Before she could put her shoes on, she had to put on her special elastic stockings that helped her circulation. The special rubber gloves she needed to put on the special stockings were somewhere in the guest room where she slept, which was also Freddie’s home office, poor Freddie. She shuffled into the guest room, fumbled through several drawers until she found the rubber gloves.

“Mom, I don’t have that much time before I have to get to work.” Molly was pacing up and down the hall, all decked out in her sneakers and Lycra. A uniform to take a walk. Joy smiled. Molly had always liked uniforms. She had taken up skating just to get the skates and the silly skirt, horseback riding just to get the breeches and the ratcatcher shirt and the white stock and the shiny black boots; skiing, tennis — she had been very good at sports, but it was all about the equipment.

“You were such a good little tennis player.”

“Mom?”

“Yes, all right, but don’t rush me,” Joy said. “I get flustered.”

“Oh, for god’s sake. Why didn’t you get ready half an hour ago when I said I was going out?”

Joy looked up from her sneaker, the lace of which she was trying to untangle. “See?” she said, beaming. “I was right! I am annoying!”

* * *

Molly and Freddie tried, they did try. They took Joy to the beach to watch the sunset. They took her to dinner. They made her dinner. They walked her up and down the street like a much-loved dog. In the evening they sat outside and had their glass of wine and Joy sat with them, but she was alone in those moments, she was alone in every moment. How could she have explained that to the two girls? That’s how she had come to think of them, as the two girls. Not The Girls. The Girls were her friends back in New York. The Two Girls were here, attentive, dutiful, insufficient.

I have no life, Joy thought. I belong nowhere. I am residing in someone else’s life, in the Two Girls’ life.

The days passed, many days, Joy was sure, though she began to lose track of them.

“Give it a little time, Mom. It’s only been a week,” Molly said.

“It seems like a year. Fish and guests, you know what they say.”

Molly looked crestfallen, a word Joy was sure she had not thought of in years. She could not stand to have her daughter look crestfallen. It broke her heart.

“It’s lovely,” she said quickly. “You two girls are wonderful to me. But what am I doing here, honey? I don’t belong here. I’m in your way and I do have my own home. At home.”

“It’s a change,” Molly said. “A change of scenery.”

Joy tried to smile appreciatively. She must stop complaining or she’d end up with yet another change of scenery, she thought, the parking lot out of a nursing home window.

* * *

That night in bed, Molly whispered to Freddie, “I think she misses him.”

“Of course she does, honey. So do you,” Freddie whispered back. “So do I. It’s been just a few months.”

“No, I mean Karl.”

Freddie started to say that was unlikely, but then wondered. “You think she’s like my father?”

Molly, obviously offended, said, “She’s lonely and vulnerable. That’s all.”

“It’s probably pretty boring for her here.”

Molly had tried to interest her mother in gardening. She offered to get raised beds if Joy wanted to grow vegetables. Molly did not like gardening, but she saw no reason that her mother shouldn’t, and if that meant fresh Tuscan kale and artichokes on Molly’s table, so much the better. “It’s very spiritual, Mom,” she’d said. “Working with the soil.” She wished her mother had shown even a little initiative, if not with vegetables, then with flowers. They had a rosebush out front that was not doing at all well.