I tell her we’d better hurry if she doesn’t want to miss the train.
It’s late in the day.
I want her to take something with her, I want her to care enough about us to take something with her, some souvenir of her time with us, but the small suitcase I retrieved from the hall closet this morning and placed by her bedside is still empty. There is nothing, she says, that she wants to take with her. No handmade Mother’s Day card she has hoarded since our childhood, no photograph or certificate of accomplishment. If she doesn’t care about us, how about herself? But she doesn’t want jewelry or makeup. How about a book, I ask, a souvenir of civilization? Civilization, she snorts. Her contempt is great. She says she is trying to get rid of things, not acquire them.
How stubborn she is, all seventy-eight pounds of her—approximately one pound for each year she has lived. She is intractable, a woman whose lack of sentimentality is more than defensive—it is aggressive, an act of force, hurls, has always hurled itself toward her family like a missile, an MX.
I am sentimental. I don’t want her to go, I want her to stay, and I think that when she goes my heart will be ground zero, my chest will be an empty cavity like a shelled-out city, devastated, but I know that she has to go, even if she is frightened and would rather not, and although no matter when we leave we will be on time, I know that, by the same token, we must not be late.
I take my mother by the hand, help her rise and lean into the walker. Next, I help her into the car and place the walker in the trunk.
As I walk around to my side of the car I glance up. Clouds push across the sky like boats across a lake. In their wake come bright breakers of light. This rippling light comes and goes as if the sun is a stone someone is skipping across the blue waters of the sky.
I slip into my seat, to the right of hers. She has gotten out of the glove compartment the small—no bigger than a walnut—brass ashtray that I bought her some years ago. It has a lid, which, though ill-fitting, serves to keep the ashes from falling out. She lifts the lid to flick her cigarette, lets it fall shut again. The ashtray won’t hold more than two filtered butts at a time.
At this time of day, the road to Reading is clotted with commuter traffic. We pass the Cunning Man, the pub where my father used to drink a half-pint if my mother was in a mood and refused to fix dinner. In a mood, some nights she announced that hunger was a weakness, food disgusting. If people did not insist on eating, she explained, they would not murder the innocents of the earth, nor would they be so easily victimized by the unintelligent who are in power everywhere.
My father, who died last year, was a sweet-tempered, largely unknown man who revealed streaks of sarcasm and bitterness only on the intermittent occasions when he’d had too much to drink. In his case, the third beer was too much—but my mother seldom let him drink it.
In the seat to my left, she is abstracted. I wonder if she, too, is remembering my father.
For my part, I find that it becomes harder to attend to the present as the past, on the march, swells its ranks, eventually dominating all time. The past has a territorial imperative, a mandate to annex the present. Memories overwhelm us; they grow so numerous that we have no time to think about anything else. They occupy us, like an invading army.
Yes, I am sentimental. I want to let nothing go. I don’t want to let her go.
What are you thinking about? I ask.
And instead of saying, Avery, she says, Mama.
It has been troubling her that, no matter how hard she tries, she still cannot believe in God the way her mother believed in Him. At seventy-five, she feels guilty that she used to say she was sick in order to stay home from Sunday School to read Grimm’s fairy tales. Her mama always made her swallow castor oil, but she now feels that this was not a sufficient expiation. She wants to be six years old again so she can be the little girl her mother wanted, instead of herself. She would go to Sunday School; she would believe every word of the Shorter Catechism.
How, she asks me now, can she fail to share the beliefs of a woman who was perfect? Who was better than perfect, she says, who was good. I must be dense, she says. After all this time, I still can’t see it. And she has tried, I know this. She recites the Lord’s Prayer to herself every night, going over it word by word, trying to understand exactly what it meant to her Presbyterian mother.
She is much more concerned with her feeling that she has somehow let her mother down, disappointed her, than she is with our feelings. I try to make allowances for this. I don’t say it’s ludicrous to feel guilt toward someone who’s been dead for twenty-seven years. I certainly don’t suggest that her perfect mother seems, imperfectly, to have saddled her with a sense of failure. My mother, who, within the limits of her circumstances, defied convention again and again, whose mind was extraordinary, berates herself not for not having been able, say, to revise her circumstances, but for her inability to accept the world into which she was born.
Women do this, even unconventional women.
Her plight, its similarity to mine, to other women’s, moves me. I am flooded with feeling—and know that she would have no use for it, would consider it a weakness. I want to touch her, but I am afraid to. Touching has never been permitted, beyond hello, good-bye. There have never been congratulatory hugs, comforting pats on the head, reassuring arms around shoulders or even admonitory wrist taps. I try to do well what I’m allowed to do—I listen.
Her mother, she says, still on that subject, never missed a Sunday in her life. But because she was perfect, she wasn’t forbidding, was never too-strict or sour. She was fun-loving and sensual—though “sensual” is not my mother’s word—petite and auburn-haired; she loved to sing and dance, just as she loved to begin each day with a Bible reading around the kitchen stove. Obadiah and oatmeal, early every morning.
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The clouds have lifted, and now, as often happens in England, there is a late-day reprieve from existential gloom, a sky like British empiricism, clear and comprehensible, uncontinental. For a few moments, as we inch our way out of the car into the station, it is almost hot, or at least we are almost too warm, in our long sleeves and wool coats, beads of perspiration creeping out from under our arms like secrets desirous of being told. Then dusk, slowly at first and then more quickly, begins to steal the warmth from the air.
The station itself is cold, like a meat locker. I feel the cold concrete under my shoes’ soles, the walls sweat like meat, damp leather and fur coats give off a dead-animal smell. On the first platform inside the gate, people bench-sit, warming their fingers around styrofoam cups of steaming milk-thick tea.
She stands in her walker, a sailor in her ship’s crow’s nest ready to shout ahoy, while I step over to the sweets counter and load up on Cadbury’s. It’s the one thing I can be sure she’ll eat—she likes her chocolate.
Now starts the long struggle down stairs and through the underground passage to emerge on the other side of the tracks. This part of our journey consumes a great deal of time and energy. By the time we are on the relevant platform, the 5:06 to Paddington—the train my parents used to take to London when they were going up for a concert—has left the station. More trains enter and leave—at this hour, the service between Reading and London is intense.
None of these trains is the one we are waiting for. My mother sits on a bench, nibbling chocolate. She breaks a tiny, dainty piece off from the bar and scrapes a few slivers from it with her teeth and swallows them, her hand in front of her mouth as she swallows because she does not like anyone to see her eating, ever.
In the past few weeks, I have had to bathe her, help her to the commode chair, hoist her on and off the seat. I know exactly how thin she is—as insubstantial as if she were her own silhouette. I know that her buttocks are as small and pointed as elbows. I know that her skin, turned to parchment by cortisone, will barely stretch across her body without tearing. She will eat a six-minute soft-boiled egg if it is served just so; otherwise, she subsists on cocoa and candy bars. Her hazel-green eyes have ghosted into gray, clouded by failing vision. She is almost deaf. All her senses are withdrawing from the world, pulling away—as if her body is finally concurring in the conclusion her mind drew long ago, that the world was not worthy of her attention.
I want to say something to her, I want her to talk to me, but she just sits there eating Cadbury’s, while the station empties. Pretty soon we are almost the only ones left on the platform, and it’s dark now, electric lights shining in the newsstand, the miniature cafeteria.
Don’t you miss Daddy? I suddenly ask her. The question flies out of me as if it has wings, as if my mouth is a sprung cage. I stand there astonished, gaping, imagining my question on the loose, on the lam like an escaped canary. My tongue feels thick, too big in my mouth, it feels like feathers, I can’t get another word out, I’m thinking she has a right to be angry with me, offended. I am presumptuous.
But I don’t dare ask her what I really want to ask her. Asking her if she misses him, what I want is for her to answer what I’m really asking her. What I am really asking her is if she will please say something to me that proves that all this caring, all this loving and losing and missing of one another that we all do, means something, that it’s not just incidental feelings that happen to go along with events that happen to happen. I think she ought to know. I think she’s lived long enough to know.
I want to hear my mother say that my father was not just a random factor, that he was an essential part of the equation of her life. She is licking her fingers. She is in no mood for metaphor. Metaphor is not what is real to her at this point.
Mama, she says, sighing, Mama was so pleased with me for marrying him, even if she did act matter-of-fact about it. Mama never let anything ruffle her. She took me downtown and bought me a trousseau for twenty-five dollars. And Papa was ecstatic—his little Eleanore was marrying a violinist! Eleanore and Avery would play their violins, and they would never have to resort to mere language for conversation—that was pretty much my Papa’s idea of heaven, so he thought it was a marriage made in heaven. But Mama approved of my choice because he was a Presbyterian. There, you see, she says sharply, wiping her hand on the front of her coat, even Avery was able to believe. I am sure that he did, even though he would never talk about something so personal. He was just like Papa in that—wouldn’t talk about anything like that. She is folding the foil and colored wrapper around the remainder of the candy bar, sticking it in her pocket, without looking at what she is doing. What if they are all together and don’t want me with them? What if I’m not permitted to join Mama? She starts to cry but stops. It would be just like the God of this world, wouldn’t it, she says, sarcasm pulling her face into a hard mask, setting her features like cement, to make heaven, if there is a heaven, a club for believers.
Her eyes fill up again, puddles in her face. I hope Mama will forgive me, she says, for not living up to her expectations.
I look at those gray eyes and say, I’m sure she forgave you a long time ago.
Her face settles back into itself and an intent waiting.
It’s as if my father has lost his connection to her as husband, even in memory, and is important only as someone who once had an effect on her relationship to her parents. He was one of their sons-in-law, that’s all.
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Now the train is coming, it is a zipper pulling into the station on the seams of the tracks. She hauls herself up into her walker and starts to stumble toward the train. Wait, I tell her; there’s plenty of time, they won’t leave without you, but she is afraid that she won’t make it to a smoking car, she has to get on a smoking car.
We find a smoking car and the conductor helps us get her on. I want to get on too, settle her in her seat, but he says, No time, no time.
And he is telling the truth, for when I look around, I discover, much to my amazement, that the station, which had been deserted, has filled up again, passengers are clambering aboard, so many many passengers where have they come from, and then what is happening becomes clear to me in a way that I had refused to let it be clear before, as I look down the length of the train, toward the engine, and I see face after face that is dear to me, all the lost people of my time, the missing souls.
And now I am frantic, my heart feels as if it is going to explode, it is a time bomb that has been rigged in my chest.
She is by a window, staring forward. I run to the window and stand on tiptoe and knock on the pane. She turns to me and smiles distantly and turns back, staring ahead. The sleek body of the train is cold fire under my palms as I lean into it, as cold as her flesh. She’s not even looking at me but I pull away and throw myself into a pantomime, waving don’t go, and then I am shouting don’t go, and it’s all happening too fast—how can things be happening so fast? While we were waiting, everything seemed to be in slow motion, but now it has all speeded up and though I am shouting, though I am crying and calling to her, no one is paying any attention to me, they are all busy busy busy, the conductors must keep things orderly orderly orderly say the wheels.
No time, luv, no time.
The engine is starting, the train is like a long, lighted tube sliding through the station, and I reach for the door but it’s too late, the train is leaving and my mother is on that train, she is going away, she is not even interested in staying. Children, what are children? Afterthoughts, byproducts. . . . Late, they arrive too late on the scene to be of consequence. She had prior commitments and she is going to meet them.
How dark it is, the train streaming out of the station into the night like a river rushing into the ocean! All at once, there is nothing—only the thin whistle of wind as it falls back from the outbound train, the dull echo of my heels on the concrete platform.
She is gone.
It’s over.
I am completely alone on the platform. Not one other person remains.
I look around and suddenly I feel vulnerable. This is not a safe place to be, I realize. Not safe. I start down the stairs, to cross over to the exit.
It’s so dark in the tunnel, I scurry through it like a mouse. I want to be with people, I want to talk with someone before her goneness becomes more real than her going-away. I want to review her going-away again and again so I won’t have to feel her goneness. I want to talk to someone who will listen to me as I try to convince myself that it’s not possible that someone who existed can not exist. I will say I believe it’s not possible that we have been sent on a journey to nowhere, and the way there is marked more by farewells than welcomings.
Such a long, sad journey—and she is taking it by herself, on that train, next to the window. As I leave the station, my used bystander’s ticket crumpled in my pocket, I think how brave she is, how brave we all are, people, all of us people alone and dying, now and forever alone, brave beyond belief.
I don’t say any of this to anyone. There is no one to say it to, and if there were, I still wouldn’t say it. It is too personal. I get in the car, in the parking lot, and turn the ignition on. The small brass ashtray, one butt, is sitting on the ledge in front of her seat on my left. I put it away in the glove compartment. She took nothing with her.
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