A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That (25 page)

“We're just buzzed.”

“You tripped coming up the hill, Rachel—
twice.”
She scratched some more and I decided to let her. “He seems like a good guy,” she said.

“I wish she'd met him earlier.”

“And not bad-looking for sixty-five. Does he have any sons?”

“Daughters, two of them,” I told her.

“Damn,” she said. “All the good ones are taken, gay, or daughters.”

Gilbert pulled a flashlight from his bag and came over to us. “Lead the way,” he said. The three of us walked across the campus, passing the administration building and student union, up three flights of steps and one more hill. I didn't trip once and brought that to Angela's attention. “See, I'm fine,” I said. And then the hiccups started.

“You don't
sound
fine,” she said.

“I get hiccups even when I'm not drinking,” I said, hiccuping.

“Please.”

We stood in front of my classroom, our backs to the door. Gilbert handed me the flashlight and I pointed the light at the tree. “It's sick, right? I know it's sick. I had a feeling,” I said.

“What do you know about trees?” Angela said, looking puzzled.

I shrugged.

“Let him do his job.” She was scratching madly now.

“Stop scratching.
You're going to start bleeding. You'll scar.” I hiccuped, raised my hand to make her quit, but she sneered at me and quit on her own.

“Don't fight, you two.” Gilbert held a metal wandlike contraption and moved toward the tree.

“We're not fighting. This is how we talk,” Angela said.

“Then don't talk.” He turned around and grinned at us.

“Your chest is red,” I said.

Angela rolled her eyes and zipped up her sweater.

I hiccuped loudly.

Gilbert was inches from the tree now, looking closely. He used the thin metal tube to dig into the tree's trunk, pulling out sap. He held the end of the tube to his fingertip. He opened and closed his finger and thumb, like scissors, then lifted the finger to his nose and inhaled. Finally, he touched his tongue and tasted the sap. “This tree is fine,” he said. “It's going to outlive us all.”

 

By the time Angela dropped us off in front of the building, Gilbert and I were nearly sober and my hiccups had disappeared. “I want to come up and kiss your mom good-bye,” he said at the elevator.

He went to her bedroom and I carried the dirty dishes to the kitchen. I was loading the dishwasher when he came up behind me. “She's yellow,” he said. He leaned against the stove with his hands behind his back, his face drawn and tired.

“It's the lighting in that room.” I turned from him and picked up a plate. I held the plate under the running water and shook my head.

“No,” he said. “It's not the lighting.”

“I'm
sort of yellow in that room,” I insisted.

“Come with me. Let's look at her.” He took the plate from my hand and set it on the counter.

Gilbert stepped into her bedroom first and flipped the light switch. I stalled in the hallway. When he looked back and motioned for me to join him, I moved into the room. My mother slept on her side and was snoring softly. I stood with Gilbert and looked at her skin, her left arm outside of the blanket, her shoulder, neck, and cheek. He was right. It wasn't a tint, but a color, something true happening—a yellow from a child's box of crayons, a deep yellow, vivid and undeniable.

2.

After Gilbert left, I finished the dishes and turned on the teakettle. It was after two A.M. but I wasn't tired. I sat on the, balcony with my cup of chamomile and a bowl of grapes and stared out at the black ocean. I picked a grape from the stem, popped it in my mouth, and looked down at the patio. It was well lit. A half-dozen gas grills stood in a horizontal row. I looked at the lounge chairs, the tables with their closed umbrellas, and thought about the suicide I witnessed years ago, just weeks after my mother's mastectomy.

I picked up the cup and blew into it. I took a sip of tea and imagined the girl falling, the way she continued to fall in my dreams for weeks after her death. She was tumbling through the air, and she wasn't quite a girl, but a blur of a girl, and she was falling right before my eyes, and when she landed with an enormous thud, the entire building shook.

She landed above the garage, four stories of cars underneath her, at nine A.M. on a weekday morning, and I remember thinking later that the drivers of those cars, at least a couple of them certainly, were probably holding their keys and opening doors and stepping inside and sitting down—their bodies answering yes to one more day, their fingers curled around steering wheels, feet poised and ready to go.

Her body was small and frail, and the force of her impact surprised me, and it surprised my mother as well, who had been sleeping in her room and was jolted awake.

The girl had been a blur, and perhaps I was a blur too, standing up and rushing toward my mother, who was standing in the hall, tying her robe at the waist, saying,
What was that?
And I blocked her view then, backed up with my arms outstretched. I stood in front of the sliding glass door, saying,
Don't look, it's a body, it's a body
, and she was covering the O of her mouth with her hand.

My mother held the phone to her ear and was asking for help, while I, despite my horror, was moving back outside to see what had become of her. The girl was no longer a blur, but a fixed thing, a curved and quiet thing, a comma on the patio.

“It's an emergency,” I heard my mother shouting into the phone. “A suicide, I think. Or maybe a murder. Oh my God.”

This is what we found out later: She didn't live in the building but in the house across the street. She followed a tenant inside and took the elevator to the roof. She was twenty-two. Her name was Bridgett. She'd had a heroin problem in the early nineties, but that was behind her now. Her parents lived in Riverside.

Men in blue suits stood around Bridgett's body, making a circle with their own bodies. They covered her with a black plastic sheet. They said things I could not make out. One man took notes. Another spoke into a recorder. A neighbor woman I recognized, clutching her housedress at the neck, stood in front of the patio door that led to the recreation room.

And there was the girl's pale ankle and bare foot sticking out from under the black plastic.

And there were her tennis shoes, one under the yellow awning and one several feet away, closer to our window.

And then I was on the couch, weeping, trying to catch my breath. And my mother was beside me, holding me. I was weeping for the girl and I was weeping for my mother and I was weeping for myself, for the many distressing moments in my life to come and how I'd have to live through them without the shoulder I was now sobbing on.

“It's okay,” my mother told me. “I'm here. I'm right here,” she said.

3.

Before she got sick, my mother was a woman who was always ready to leave me. When she visited my apartment, which was rare, she'd walk the halls with her purse on her arm, itching to go. She'd walk fast, the purse bouncing at her hip, talking and moving at once. It was impossible for her to sit and listen. After illness came, she moved slowly. She put her purse down.

She invited me to live in her apartment on the sand. She wanted to spend time. She listened. We ate dinners together, went to movies. I listed her men who weren't always nice by name and crude gesture. My mother apologized.

After the chemo from the yew tree had stopped working and the fatigue returned, we spent most of our time together in her bedroom. Once, the two of us were watching a ridiculous man on television, a man who claimed to talk to the dead, and I told my mother to talk to me now, to tell me everything I'd need to know now, so that I wouldn't have to follow a man like him around, so I wouldn't have to give him money and beg him to translate her wishes. “I'm tired,” she said. “Haven't I said enough?”

She was sitting up in bed and I was in the chair across from her. I squeezed lotion into my palm and rubbed my hands together. “Please,” I said.

“What?”
She was impatient, sweating and cold at once.

“Tell me one thing, just one.”

She sighed. She leaned back on her pillows and thought for a moment. “Finish your book. Make it good,” she said. “And get a new screen door for the balcony.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Don't always obey the law.”

I looked at her, puzzled.

“If no one's around and it's after one A.M., run the red light. Don't wait around, is what I'm saying.” She paused, thoughtful. “But be careful. I don't want you joining me because of some car accident.”

“Joining you?”

“In heaven.”

Once she'd started she didn't want to stop. “Always buy plenty of socks and underwear. If a pan doesn't come clean, toss it out. Don't spend hours at the sink, that's what I'm saying.”

I smiled.

“If the plants on the balcony die, take them back.”

“What?”

“Take them back. I've been taking them back for years. Where do you think I'm going when I carry those dry pots out the front door?”

“To the trash chute?”

“Never.”

“Where?”

“Back to the store, that's where.”

“You return them?” I said, incredulous.

“Absolutely,” she said. “I tell them they're dead. I show them their dead plants, and they replace them. They help me to the car with beautiful new ones, the same plants, only alive and green.”

“You're kidding,” I said.

She shook her head.

“Why don't you just water them?” I asked her.

“There's not always time. What sort of woman
always
has time to water the plants?”

“A lot of them,” I said.

“That's right,” she said. “Don't be like
a lot
of them.”

My hands were still dry, so I picked up the lotion again and squeezed a small amount into my palm. I was rubbing my hands together and she was staring at them. “Want some lotion?” I asked her.

She shook her head no. “Come lie down with me,” she said.

I got up from the chair and moved to the bed. I lay down, my head in her lap. “And get to know your father and step-mother. Sure, they live in New Jersey and you don't want to go to New Jersey, but go anyway. Sit with him and tell him about yourself. Let him tell you what his life is like.”

I raised my head in protest.

“Well, at least call them more often.”

“Okay,” I said, resting my head again on her thigh.

“The divorce wasn't your father's fault.”

“I never thought it was,” I told her.

She laughed. “I was just too young.”

“And the wrong woman.”

“That too,” she said. She had her hand in my hair now, was lightly scratching my scalp with her fingernails, which was something I loved, that I remembered her doing when I was a child.

“And I don't care if you call her Mom,” she continued.

“Who?”

“Your stepmother.”

“I'm in my thirties,” I said.

“You'll always need a mom, it's in your nature. Most girls have had enough mothering at fifteen, but not you,” she said.

“Great.”

“It's true. You'll need a mom at eighty.”

“What will I do at eighty without one?”

“I don't know,” she said. “What
will
you do?”

Today I want to move. It happens every few days since my mother died, this desire for big change, this urge to go. It has me looking in the newspaper, my new glasses halfway down my nose, yellow highlighter in my hand. I didn't realize I needed them, the glasses, attributed the headaches and faint type to stress, but now that they're here on my face I'm surprised at the black letters I see before me, their size and certainty. I check out one bedrooms and two bedrooms and three bedrooms alike, houses, apartments, a condo on a man-made lake. I highlight what sounds good, put little stars by my favorites. I'm not at all sure what I want. Anything is possible. Tomorrow or even tonight I'll look at my own apartment, the walls and corners, the view of the sea, my scrubbed floors, and I'll be grateful I'm here, relieved I didn't sign a lease elsewhere. But right now I want to move.

Several times I've talked on the phone to a real estate agent named Michael Brown. I told him I'm ready and want to buy something, a house with a yard and lawn, flowers, a place to park my car. I told him that I like big windows and closets, high ceilings and open spaces. I said the sound of traffic doesn't bother me, a busy street is fine. I said silence was okay, too. Both have their advantages. Great, he said, great. His voice was deep, sexy. I wondered what this Michael Brown looked like. Later, I touched myself, hearing his voice in my head.

This is what happens: I'll be in the middle of something, grocery shopping or teaching a class, and the urge to leave will hit me. I'll bolt from the gas station, my tank only a quarter filled, and speed off without my gas cap. I'll dash out of the market, ditching the orange juice and butter on a shelf next to the bread. Most recently I stuck a bag of green apples in the freezer, next to the ice cream. I was hasty; I had to go. I had houses to drive by and streets to explore.

Last Thursday, in the middle of a lesson, I left my students, who were surprised. I watched them get angry. They shook their heads, whispered. It was a college class, for God's sake. The cranky girl with purple hair and a shiny stud in her tongue said, “I got up early
for this?”
I heard Molly, and yes, I was sorry, but the urge was great and strong, beyond my control. I wanted to tell her about the abandoned apples, where I left them, and saw them in my mind, their green skins crystallized, their insides frozen, the flimsy bag gone stiff with ice. I wanted to tell her that I needed a new home, that leaving apples in a freezer isn't one more mistake, but indicative of my urgency, my need for cover. Can't you see? I wanted to say, but she didn't want to hear from me, I could tell. I rushed from the front of the classroom to the door, nearly forgetting my notebook and sweater. “I'll make it up to you,” I said, remembering my belongings, turning back to my desk to get them.

“You're at work,” Molly said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Work comes first.”

“We'll get to those poems tomorrow,” I told her, gathering the notebook and sweater in my arms.

“Work is serious,” she continued. She shook her head. Her jaw fell open. The sun coming in the classroom pitched just enough light on her tongue ring to make it visible. Even from across the room I thought I saw it glittering in the girl's mouth. Months earlier, when she'd first pierced it, she'd come to my office to discuss her grade. She'd tell me about the guy she'd been pursuing all semester, how that pursuit had taken time away from her studies. “Work comes first,” I had said. The girl's tongue was swollen like a ball or eggplant. She asked me what she might do to bring her
C
up to an
A.
Was there extra credit, a paper or poems she could write? She would write those poems today, this very afternoon, she said, and they'd be good, she promised, because the guy she pursued didn't give a damn about her now, and the rejection inspired her writing, the work was coming easy; she was already writing those poems inside her head. “Is it ever like that for you?” she wanted to know. Molly was talking fast, and at the same time mumbling, struggling with the words, and I could see her fat tongue flopping side to side.

“Work comes first,” she said again, clearly now, defiant, confident like a girl who'd never had a great, fat tongue.

“Yes, yes,” I said. “I'm sorry,” I told the class, rushing out the door.

That afternoon I went north, cruised familiar and unfamiliar neighborhoods: Westwood, Santa Monica, and Pasadena. I was looking for signs in windows, posted signs dug into lawns. I wanted to know about square footage and parking, the view and hardwood floors.

Today I want to pack my favorite things—plates and pots, pillows and books—in boxes and not look back. I want to hire a row of men, each one stronger and lovelier than the next, to lift those boxes and take them wherever it is I have decided to go. I'm not at all sure where I want to go. Occasionally I want to go far away to another country, Spain or France, but that thought passes quickly. Sometimes I imagine living on the East Coast, closer to my father and stepmother, where a person can wear a coat, a pair of gloves, a hat that covers half of her face. Most often I want to move a few cities north—say, the Hollywood Hills or Venice Beach. But today I'd like to find an apartment on the sand in the city in which I now live, and since my own apartment is on the sand, people question my motivation.

Daniel, who is my student once again, leaves notes taped to my office door. They're not even folded over, anyone passing by can take a look. They say things like,
I take you and your class seriously you should do the same for me
, or
I know you're having a hard time let's have a cup of coffee
, or
I've read your book ten times now and your poems rock
, or
You only want to move and change jobs because of grief I know about grief
, the boy writes.

My mother, who is now ashes in an urn, who is now pebbles and small particles in a cylinder, sits on a little table I've set up just for her. She wanted me to stay in her apartment on the sand and make a life. She wanted me to find someone to soothe me. She wanted me to see things through: the jobs and books and men I've started, but haven't finished.

Now I want to go where she is, just as I always wanted to go where she was going: to the store or school, to work, even to sleep when she'd climb into covers with men that frightened me, men who weren't always nice.

I wanted one of those leashes you see at the mall, the ones mothers wrap around their toddlers' waists so that the toddlers will not wander. But I was a grown woman when I wanted a leash like that, and I wanted to follow my mother everywhere, even into that midnight morning.

I changed things around, made the apartment mine before she died. I brought up my desk and futon and coffee table from the office I rented downstairs. I set the desk up in the living room. I pointed the desk at the sea so while I worked I could watch the boats and tiny swimmers.

One night, months ago, I kidnapped my mother from the place she then called home. I didn't get her doctor's permission. I hustled past the nurses' station, one skinny nurse twirling her hat on her finger, another one eating a fruity muffin. I could smell the muffin all the way down the hall. I could hear the nurses laughing, enjoying each other's company. I helped my mother out of the sheets, stuffed her swollen feet inside furry slippers. I brought a robe for her, a cherry-colored thing that months earlier she'd called
cheerful.
“I love that cheerful robe,” she'd said. Now, though, she looked at the robe and at me, her daughter, wrapping her up like a gift, as if she wasn't sure what she felt. I helped her down the hall, my arm under her arm. I moved my fifty-nine-year-old mother, walked with her past the sleeping residents, who were in their eighties and nineties, who had come to this home to die, who were snoring and grunting, one woman howling like a wolf.

I brought my mother into her apartment that was now becoming mine. She said she was happy to be there, in that apartment she loved, even for just one night. She said I did a good job rearranging things, that the place was minimal and elaborate at once, an improvement over the way she'd had it. It sounds evil, I now think, to bring a dying woman to her home, showing her that even that is not quite hers.

She was bright yellow by then, her liver half gone, and I slept with her in her bed, which I'd moved to the opposite wall. I'd bought a comforter full of feathers, one I hoped she'd think was pretty, with little roses and green leaves. I told her that the bed against that wall was better, that she'd never again trip over cords and the small table where she stacked her medicines, where she'd lean the bottles on their sides and balance them in a row, then stack them on top of each other, until they became a pyramid of pills, capsules, and tablets prone to disruption, an avalanche of drugs, from the slightest bump of knee or elbow. Now, I told her, there was a wall to back the bottles up. It would be easier for her when she came home. The two of us nodded at each other, knowing she would never leave that place.

By nine P.M. she was on the phone with her roommate, the diabetic woman in bed B, Joanne, who shit in her big diapers every afternoon while I was visiting. My mother was assuring Joanne that she'd be home early in the morning. She'd called that place home, I remember, and then she was saying goodnight to Joanne, claiming to miss her. Joanne, a gruff woman with one leg, who admitted being mean before anyone took a saw to her limb. A woman who bragged about beating her children until they were tall enough to hit back. A woman with bad teeth, whose mouth I could smell from across the room when her diaper wasn't filled. A woman whose own daughter refused to visit. A woman my mother had met just days ago, and all they had in common was death rushing to fetch them both.

“I'll be home in the morning,” my mother was saying, and I was looking around her room at my own clever changes, then tugging on her robe, the sleeve, as I might have done when I was four. “Talk to me,” I said. “You're just here for the night.”

“Bye-bye,” she told Joanne. The phone fell from her hand onto her pillow, and even that I had to take care of.

I wanted to bring my mother home, and even though I'd changed things around, I wanted her to feel
at home
, safe and comfortable, but she was restless in her own bed, stirring in the night, saying in a sleepy voice,
Where am I?

“You're home,” I said, “with me.”

“Who?” she said.

“Me,” I repeated.

“Oh,” she said.

When she had to pee, I helped her into the bathroom. The pee was pungent, dark brown and strong, not like any pee I recognized. It was late, the middle of the night. I tried to smile at my sleepy mother, helping her up. I tried not to look at the pee when I flushed, but caught a glimpse despite myself. I thought pee like that should be called something else, not urine, not waste. Something foul as that should have had its own name.

In the morning I helped her into the car. She insisted on the backseat so she could rest. I drove her car that was becoming mine. She was sleeping on her side, curled up, snoring and mumbling, incoherent back there, and every now and then I turned to look at her, staring at her one cheek and closed eye. She wouldn't like me driving like that. She wouldn't want me to stare and get upset. She wouldn't want me to swerve and weep going eighty miles an hour.

I removed my acrylic nails one by one with my teeth. I spit the acrylic into my palm, then let the bits fall into the ashtray. I left little spots of red polish that I'd get to later. I decided to let my own nails grow—never again would I walk into that beauty shop where the two of us went together, where I'd make her pull up a chair and sit next to me.

“I'm right here,” she'd say from the couch, a magazine open in her lap.

“Closer” I'd insist.

“How close can I get?”

“A lot closer than where you are now. Get a chair,” I'd say. “Please,” I'd tell her.

In a traffic jam on a side street I turned and looked at my sleeping mother again. Her wig was lopsided. She'd stopped snoring and was breathing softly. I stared at the empty passenger seat. I took the 710 North to the 405 North and then I got off at Durango, headed south, and drove my mother home.

 

That night at Safeway in the fruit and vegetable aisle, I saw Daniel. He was wearing a ridiculous outfit—tight black pants and a red and white striped shirt. It was the silly beret folded and hanging from his back pocket I saw first. “Daniel,” I said.

“You look terrible, Rachel,” he said, matter-of-factly.

“Thank you,” I said.

“She's going, isn't she?” he said softly.

“No, no,” I lied.

“You're going to be okay,” he said. “I know it doesn't seem like you'll survive, but you will.”

“What are you wearing?” I said, trying to change the subject. “What's with the silly getup?”

“I'm a gondolier” he said.

“You do those canals, right? It's beautiful out there.”

“What's happening with your mom? Where is she now?” he wanted to know.