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

And Molly was doing nothing to help her. Nothing.

She sat in the dappled shade of a small garden, admiring a spider’s web that ran from the tea tree branch up to the trunk of the apricot tree, a marvel of fantasy engineering, beautiful in the soft afternoon light, ugly as a weapon, a large beetle imprisoned in its lace. She was sitting, staring at a cruel bit of silver embroidery while her mother floated helplessly in her loneliness, stunned and airborne, not even caught in her fall like the beetle. Molly was watching a hummingbird, listening to the whir of its movement, catching the colors of its throat as they changed, and they were dazzling, and the sound of a finch was musical and a flock of noisy parrots flew high above. The flowers of the succulents were blooming, minuscule, stunted, almost invisible. Everything was soft and green and serene. Molly was comfortable and the neighbor’s cat stretched beyond the fence, a calico cat, and — she couldn’t help herself — she was filled with joy and a sense of wonder. Her happiness made her sad, because it wasn’t fair, it couldn’t be fair to be happy when her mother was falling from a building toward the cold gray sidewalk.

Joy took Gatto and a sandwich to the park.

“I went all the way to Daddy’s park,” she told Molly. “I bought a turkey sandwich, low sodium, and ate it on a bench.”

“I went to Daddy’s little park,” she told Danny. “It was very peaceful.”

She’d been looking for Karl, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t at the coffee shop at his usual time, either. She had missed Karl more than she expected when she was in California. She hoped he wasn’t dead. She considered walking to his building to ask the doorman if Karl had died while she was in California, but if he had, she would be devastated, and if he hadn’t, she would be embarrassed.

“She’s seeing that guy again, I’m sure of it,” Daniel told Molly. “She went to Daddy’s park. That’s like code. She’s very vulnerable right now. In more ways than one.” Daniel had finally worked out where all her bits and pieces of money had been squirreled away in different bank accounts to confuse Aaron, and there wasn’t much left. “The good news is, he’s a fool if he’s after her money.”

“She does not want to sell Upstate.”

“She’s running out of dough, Molly.”

“We’ll help her.”

“What if she gets sick again? We can’t afford all those aides. She spent everything on Daddy. She’s broke.”

Molly said, “She’s got the house.”

“My point exactly.”

And so the argument went, round and round and back again. For Molly, Upstate was a tie to home. For Joy, the house was both her past and what she would give to her children’s future. Daniel understood all of it. He felt the same way, really.

“But we have to be realistic, Molly. If she sells Upstate, she’ll be able to plan properly, plan how much she can spend each year.”

“She can’t plan,” his sister said slowly, clearly, as if talking to someone else’s backward child, “because she doesn’t know how long she will live. Why are we pretending she can make plans? Why can’t she just live her life?”

“Because,” he said, just as slowly and clearly, “she has no money.”

* * *

Joy knew they spoke to each other about her. She didn’t like it, but she didn’t want to know what it was about, either, because she already did: it was about what to do with her.

They were always coming up with electronics that were meant to make her life easier but ran out of batteries.

“They mean well,” she said to Karl. He had not died, but he had suffered from a long bout of flu. This was his first day out.

“I’m sorry I worried you,” he said. “Why didn’t you call?”

“No news is good news, Karl.” They were sitting in Central Park on a bench facing a noisy playground. “Molly and Daniel want me to be happy, but they’re driving me crazy. I think someone of my age and experience should be allowed to feel exactly the way she wants.”

“Hear, hear.”

“Which is miserable.”

“Hear, hear.”

It was pleasant to have someone to meet in the park, to meet at the coffee shop, someone who knew her when she was young and beautiful, someone who remembered the things she remembered. Karl began to tell her a story about an uncle who had been a bootlegger but got the flu and missed a meet-up at which everyone else got shot. She’d heard the story before and closed her eyes. Oh, Aaron, she thought, her attention drifting comfortably, I do miss you. You should be here with us. You loved this story.

“Are you married?” she asked Marta as the three of them walked slowly across Fifth Avenue. Joy wondered if men still married their nurses, the way they did in World War I novels. No, now it was just doctors who married their young nurses, married doctors who left the wives who had put them through medical school.

“Don’t like,” Marta said.

“I think marriage is a fine institution.” Karl stopped to catch his breath when they reached the sidewalk.

“Institution” is a funny word, Joy thought, like a mental hospital.

“Why don’t like?” she asked Marta.

“Husband drink.”

“Well, I don’t drink,” Karl said. “Not excessively.”

“ Or ,” Marta added pointedly, “husband old . Get sick.”

Joy repeated the conversation to Danny, laughing, but he seemed quite serious and said, “Well, she’s right. Terrible to get stuck with an old invalid. At least Marta gets paid for all she does to take care of him.”

“Well, of course she’s right, in a way, but it never stops anyone, does it? You should hear what goes on in Florida.”

“I think I’d rather not.”

* * *

“I think it’s nice she has a friend,” Coco said. “Someone she can talk to.”

“She can talk to me.”

Coco suggested he might be jealous.

“She doesn’t understand,” Molly said when he told her. “She doesn’t understand us,” she said to Freddie.

Freddie understood. The clan was pulling together just as they had when Daniel was in the hospital, when Aaron went bankrupt. The Bergmans against the world. There was no room for an outsider. The emptiness left by Aaron’s death was not a space to be filled; it was a bond to be protected.

Ruby’s bat mitzvah was months away, but Joy began going through her clothes, looking for something suitable to wear. It was a tiring business, trying on clothes. She made sure to do it in the morning before her afternoon fatigue set in. The discarded dresses and trousers and jackets and blouses were strewn around her bedroom, colorful, fluttering like flags when she passed.

“What in god’s name happened?” Daniel said when he saw her bedroom.

“I’m looking for an outfit.”

He pushed some clothes aside and sat on the edge of the bed. “Where do you sleep?”

“On the couch. In the living room.”

The dining-room table was again covered in papers. And now that Walter and Wanda were no longer coming and Elvira was back to once every two weeks, the kitchen was a mess. Daniel washed the dishes in the sink, then opened the refrigerator. It was filled with demitasse saucers, some covered with plastic wrap, some with aluminum foil, some with paper towels, some uncovered. How many demitasse saucers could one person own? There had to be thirty diminutive saucers, and beside them was a jumble of plastic containers used for condiments at coffee shops.

“Hungry?” his mother asked. “I have half a hard-boiled egg somewhere, and a little bit of applesauce. There’s a bit of chicken soup … Oh no, don’t touch that dish, that’s food for Gatto…”