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

The taxi driver popped the trunk and pulled her bag out for her. Before she could grab it, the doorman was already rolling it beneath the canopy to the door. When Molly was growing up here, the doormen were such a normal, essential part of her life. She had never really gotten used to living without doormen. They always knew where your parents were, when they’d be home, if the dog had been walked, if your brother had friends with him — an early alert system for family life. If you lost your keys, they let you into the apartment. They handed you packages. They told you the mailman had come when you were waiting for college acceptances and refusals. When she was little she had loved their uniforms with their names stitched on the chest, their smart hats like policemen’s hats, but unlike a policeman, they picked you up and swung you through the air and lent you a quarter if you needed it for candy. She’d known some of them, the older ones, for what seemed like her whole life.

“Hi! Hi! It’s so good to be here!” she said, then realized she did not actually know this particular doorman and had greeted him too warmly. He did look familiar, perhaps because of a strong resemblance to Mussolini. Squat head, square jaw, wide frown. He was probably too young to know who Mussolini was. The name stitched on his uniform was Gregor.

“The Bergmans,” she said. “I’m their daughter. I have a key. They’re expecting me.”

A novel by James Patterson was spread-eagled on the console. He glanced at it longingly as they went to the elevator, saying, “Your mother will be glad to see you.” He spoke in a heavy, clouded voice, just as she would have expected a Mussolini look-alike to speak, though the accent was wrong, Eastern European. “She’s had a rough night.”

“Is she okay? Did something happen?”

“Oh,” said Gregor, and he cleared his throat. “ She’s fine, but…”

“My father? Oh god. What happened?”

The elevator doors opened.

“They’re both home, safe and sound,” Gregor said as the doors closed.

Home? Of course they were home. Where else would they be at midnight?

Molly burst through the door, unlocked as always. “Mom! Mom! What’s going on?”

Her mother was lying on the couch in the living room, though Molly had trouble locating her at first, she was so swaddled in down. A down comforter, a down robe beneath it, down booties, and, which was new to Molly, a down hood. “I’m here,” the little face said. “I’m fine, darling.”

“But Daddy?”

“I’m trying to warm up. What a night. Your father is okay now, back in bed where he belongs.” She took a sip of water from a paper cup on the side table. Why did she use paper cups? Molly wondered. To make the apartment seem more like a hospital?

“I was reading, I guess I fell asleep—”

“Mom?”

“A really deep sleep, which I have not had in weeks, believe me. I checked on your father at ten, before I went to bed. I made sure he went to the bathroom to pee, I checked the colostomy pouch…”

Oh, please spare me those particular details, Molly thought guiltily, knowing her mother could not spare herself those details.

“And he was comfortable and quiet. So I came back here to my nest.”

It did not look like a nest, that undulating pile of pillows and comforters, more like an avalanche from which long-lost hikers might at any moment emerge, shaking themselves off, wondering how they ended up in this Manhattan living room. “And?” Molly said, rather sharply, moving her hands in circles as if to speed things up.

Perhaps, Joy thought, Molly’s authoritarian nature came along with the work she did, a professional hazard, like Marie Curie being exposed to radiation. Molly was exposed to so many pottery shards. They were not radioactive, but there were so many and they were minuscule and each one might turn out to be the important one, but who could tell, they were so small and filthy, and so you had to gather them up as if they were diamonds, then separate them, then put them back together again. Well, you would have to be officious, wouldn’t you, with all those shards depending on you? Joy had been so proud when Molly decided to study archaeology, when she got her Ph.D., when she went off to Turkey to dig up ancient pots. It was like an Agatha Christie novel. It was like Agatha Christie’s life with her archaeologist husband, minus a husband, of course, but that was another story. You had to clean the dug-up bits and pieces with a soft toothbrush like the ones for people with diseased gums. This thought always made Joy shudder, as if the pottery shards were in fact old decayed teeth. Then the discoveries, such as they were, would have to be labeled on bits of paper like the slips in a Chinese fortune cookie. Then they would end up buried again, in drawers in a university or museum, never to see daylight for another thousand years or so. No wonder Molly was always trying to organize Joy. She even tried to organize her own body, stretching this muscle, strengthening that one. If Molly could number the hairs on her head, Joy was sure she would, she was so busy trying to order the world. She had been the same as a child, not particularly obsessive or compulsive, although she did refold her clothes when Joy brought them up from the laundry room, come to think of it. But it was more a show of strength, this insistence on order, her own order, a demand rather than a need.

That would keep anybody busy, never mind her job. Look at her, poor dear, so antsy-pantsy. She was looking good, though. Fit. Always fit. An obsession. There were worse obsessions. She resembled her father with that long face. Sculptural, Joy liked to think, though others might call it craggy. The face was frowning ferociously now. Of course! Joy hadn’t told her about Aaron yet. No wonder! “Where was I? Oh, I came here into the living room and I read a little and then I must have fallen asleep—”

“Mom!” Molly snapped. “Could you just tell me what actually happened, for god’s sake?”

Her mother glared at her and snapped back: “Your father got out of bed and pulled his urine-soaked pajama pants and adult diaper down around his ankles and went out, like that, with his urine-soaked pajamas and adult diaper around his ankles, into the elevator to the lobby, okay? The doorman brought him back.”

“Jesus.”

“ Gregor —Jesus retired last year. All right? Okay? Direct enough for you, Molly? Delivered quickly enough? Sorry I was not as concise as you would have liked. I’m sorry I didn’t describe your father’s humiliation with the clarity and alacrity you demand…”

Molly sank onto the downy couch beside her mother. “Oh, Mom,” she said tenderly. “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry.”

They sat like that for a while, quiet, together, and she snuggled against her mother, then went into her parents’ bedroom. Her father was asleep, the quilt pulled up to his chin. He had aged since she last saw him, not that long ago despite her mother’s admonitions, two months. But Aaron, breathing noisily, his face otherwise so still, looked old, like an old, old man. Molly kissed his forehead.

* * *

“I’m sorry you walked in on such a drama,” Joy said. They were squeezed in at the table in the kitchen drinking the house specialty, decaffeinated tea, weak, lukewarm.

“I’m sorry you have to deal with this, Mommy.”

“Gregor is a nice young man. He and his wife just had a baby.”

“Do you think maybe you should lock the door? At night? Then, if Daddy gets up—”

“What if there’s a fire?” her mother said, appalled. “You’re not thinking, Molly.”

Molly stirred her tea. The sound of the spoon against the teacup was musical, like bells.

“I hate being such an old ruin,” Joy said softly.