In Reach (11 page)

“She’s better off, poor soul. I always say I don’t fear death, but I don’t look forward to the dying.”

“Why don’t you shut up?”

Hazel turns from her mopping. She feels herself growing large, but she can’t help it. Iris looks confused, unfocused. Hazel hardly blames her, the shock, the giant has spoken.

“I can’t stand your constant chatter. You never leave alone a single second of silence.”

“I’m sorry.” Iris turns red, stammering. Hazel thinks she ought to be enjoying this more than she is.

“You don’t live in reality, you know that? All your yammering about heaven. You think people are just stacked up over there, like airplanes on a runway?”

Hazel pauses, surprised to discover she wants to know what Iris thinks. Where is my mother, she wants to ask. She waits, but Iris says nothing.

“Well?” she prods.

“What I believe is my business.”

“You make it everybody else’s business.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Hazel sees how it is, then. Iris won’t tell her. Not her.

“I’m sick to death of your smiling face,” Hazel says. Her eyes sting. She needs to get out of here, and fast. Turning, she throws one more line over her shoulder. “I got along fine before you came.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

Hazel stops still. She draws in a ragged breath. She grinds her teeth and hardens her face before she turns to face Iris.

“So, that’s what Barbara and Lucille said?”

“It’s all over town. No one can stand to work with you. You drive everybody away.”

Hazel clings to the handle of her mop. She’s afraid if she lets go, she’ll fall down.

“You don’t care about anyone but yourself,” Iris says, her voice trembling and high. She’s flailing a feather duster when Jerry rushes in.

Younger than either of them, up to here with administrative hassle, Jerry all but shouts at them. “What the hell is going on in here? We have patients in this hospital who expect a little peace and quiet.”

“I can’t work with her,” Hazel says.

“Fine.” Jerry’s hands land on his hips. “Then quit.”

Hazel turns her back on him. She blinks hard and stares at the blank white wall. She tries to think what else she might do, but comes up with nothing. This job is all she has. She’s never had to quit before. The others have always quit.

She turns around slowly. Jerry and Iris are talking softly. She doesn’t need to hear the words to know that he’s taking Iris’s side.

“How about if we divide up the work?” Hazel makes this offer. She might as well be throwing every nickel she owns into a poker pot. “Maybe different shifts? I just don’t want to be in the same room with her.”

Jerry studies the floor for a minute. He scratches at his head. Then, he turns to Iris.

“That all right with you, Iris?”

“Fine.” Iris sets her lips in a prim line. Hazel studies her. She’s not going to back down, and Hazel likes that.

“All right.” Jerry lets exasperation show in his voice. “I’ll see what kind of schedule I can work out. Until then, you think you can manage to get the work done?”

When Jerry is gone, Iris and Hazel look each other over.

“If you want to go on, I’ll finish up this room.” Iris, for once, doesn’t smile.

“No, you go. I’ll do it.”

“Suit yourself.” Iris shrugs and moves off.

Finally, with the room to herself, Hazel begins to relax. She moves around the periphery, thinking about Mabel Becker. She remembers Mabel had a role once in the town melodrama, played the heroine who gets tied to the tracks. She had pretty gold hair
then. Hazel sits on the edge of the bed and runs her hands over the pillow. There are one or two cards left. Hazel reads them, sentimental drivel, drops them in the wastebasket. She opens the drawer of the bedside table and takes out the copy of the Bible provided by the Gideons. Inside the front cover, where she saw Mabel tuck it one day, she finds a photo of Mabel and Barney. Both of them smiling, their heads tilted together, in front of Mount Rushmore. On the back, in Mabel’s handwriting,
50th anniversary trip
. Hazel studies their faces, memorizing Mabel’s, then slips the photo in her pocket.
I can’t live without you
, Barney had written. But he would.

Redeeming the Time Being

Emily and her mother face each other across a narrow table in a foreign café. Annie, who never drinks coffee, has taken to it here in Spain, orders
café manchado
, a shot of espresso with milk and sugar. She says she likes that it’s served in a tiny ceramic cup, not in a 14-ounce cardboard container like the lattes she’s tried back home in Lincoln, Nebraska.

They don’t look alike, this mother and daughter. Both are tall and thin, but Emily has the androgynous figure of a teen model, all legs and no hips. Annie’s short, gray-peppered hair waves away from her face. Emily’s blond hair stands up a half-inch long, a new style she hoped would shock her mother. Instead, Annie can’t stop talking about how gorgeous Emily looks, how the buzz cut plays up her eyes.

“What shall we do today?” Annie peers over the brim of her coffee. Her hands cradle the cup, evenly trimmed nails on long fingers.

“I don’t know, Mom. What’s left to see?” Emily doesn’t mask her annoyance.

“How about your new apartment?”

“I don’t think so. Bea and Nieves are both gone over the holidays. I hardly know them. I don’t feel right about going there.”

“Can’t we just peek in? I’d like to be able to picture you there next semester.”

Emily shifts in her chair. Bites her ragged fingernails. “If I’m here.”

“Of course you’ll be here. We’ve been over this.”

“You’ve been over it.”

“It will get better. If you leave now, you’ll miss out on the best part of the year.”

They sit without speaking for a few minutes. Emily’s foot jostles up and down under the narrow table. She hates it here. She’s staying at a hotel with her mother during the Christmas break because she moved out on her host family. She couldn’t take the blaring television, the old man and woman yelling at each other, the grandbaby crying. They gave her their best room, clean and Spartan, with a little girl’s pink bedspread, a framed photo of Monica the saint, their previous exchange student who did nothing but study all day. Emily made herself eat disgusting food,
jamón
and something that tasted like bacon fat. She didn’t know until two months into her year abroad that other Spaniards eat vegetables. She tried once to buy a tomato from a street vendor, but somehow purchased a postcard of the Virgin Mary. There are Virgins everywhere, garishly painted and plastic, some with blinking neon eyes, others spitting water from kewpie doll lips. One, in the doorway of a shoe store, holds out supplicating arms.

“Emily. You’re making me nervous.”

“Sorry.” Emily presses her hand on her knee to settle her leg in place. She studies her mother, the familiar face, little makeup, softening skin, intelligent eyes. “Do you think about him?”

“Of course. You know I do.”

“I keep seeing him in that hospital room.”

“There was nothing we could do.” Annie’s voice sounds small and far away. There’s a note in it Emily has not heard before. She’s aware that there are many things about her mother she’s
noticing for the first time. For instance, when did she lose ten or fifteen pounds? Why does she take so long in the bathroom getting ready for bed at night? When did she get so tense, so anal? Annie showed up in Seville with a guidebook, all the famous tourist places underlined. In five days, they’ve been to the Alcazar, the cathedral, the Plaza de España, and several small art galleries. They’ve walked the halls of the old tobacco factory where Bizet set
Carmen
and where Emily theoretically attends classes at the Universidad de Sevilla. It’s not the season, or her mother would have them attending a bullfight.

“I’ve been offered a sabbatical.” Her mother, changing the subject.

Emily feels her gut wrench. “Really?”

Her mother does this. Trots off somewhere in the middle of every important moment in Emily’s life. The year she started junior high, her mother was in India, researching the influence of Indian culture on British literature. During Emily’s prom, in London accepting an award for her definitive book on the Brontë family. She never takes Emily with her. Emily’s father wasn’t able—or willing—to leave his architectural business to travel for months at a time, and her mother didn’t want to be saddled with a child in a foreign place. No wonder she insisted that Emily do this year abroad. She wanted her out of the way so she could plan her next academic adventure.

“For next year,” her mother says.

“Where would you go this time?”

Her mother puts down her cup, looks at her. Sighs. She opens the small bag she wears around her neck and fingers through her wallet, counting pesetas to pay the bill.

“We can talk about it later,” she says.

Not caring that she sounds petulant, Emily says, “I don’t want to spend our last day doing touristy stuff.”

Her mother doesn’t even pause. “Okay. You decide.”

Emily looks out the window of the café. Suddenly she’s tired. She wants to go back to the hotel, curl up on the bed, and face the wall. Instead, she says, “We could go hear flamenco.”

“Terrific. When?”

“It starts about midnight.”

Annie glances at her watch. “Only fourteen hours to wait. How about if we go shopping in the meantime?”

They’re in an Andalusian lace shop, the last place Emily wants to be. Her mother embarrasses her, spouting out a few words left over from high school Spanish, the woman behind the counter humoring her. Emily believes all these shopkeepers hold tourists in contempt, especially Americans with their loud voices, sloppy sweatshirts, big white and neon flashy tennis shoes. The clerk looks elegant in a simple black dress, black leather shoes, her hair swept into a chignon. Emily guesses she may be older than her mother.

“Mom,” Emily whispers into her mother’s ear. “Let’s go.”

Annie has somehow managed to communicate which laces she’s interested in, and the clerk lifts down bolts of ivory, white, ecru, off-white, linen-white, beige, cream, and natural lace. “Emily, look.” Annie holds her hand beneath the delicate fabrics, the pigment of her fingers highlighting the detail of the woven patterns. “Let’s buy some for your wedding gown.”

Is she kidding? “Mom, I don’t even have a boyfriend.”

Her mother ignores her. “Doesn’t it make you think of Jane Austen?”

“I’m not getting married.” Emily thinks this is the truest thing she’s said to her mother since she arrived in Seville. Why get married? Over half end in divorce, and of the percent that make it, one of the partners ends up alone. Why would she want to risk that?

Her mother tugs on her sleeve. “Emily, do you like the purer whites or these off-whites? Some of them tend toward gray and
others more yellow? Look. Cool or warm. Let’s see which goes better with your skin.”

Emily dives deep inside, her body twitching to run from the store, knock every bolt off the shelf, and wound her mother in the process. But the clerk is watching, so instead, Emily stands silent and stiff while her mother makes gross grammatical errors speaking in halting Spanish phrases and drapes lace after lace over her shoulders.

Eventually, Annie settles on a heavy ivory lace, the cut pattern floral but indeterminate. Emily winces when her mother hands over her credit card. Annie has chosen one of the most extravagantly priced laces in the shop, and she asks for five yards.

“Mom, we’re not talking about a tent.”

“Emily. Be still. Let me do this.”

They get out of the lace shop and trudge down the street. Emily walks fast, leaving her mother steps behind. She needs to kick a dog. Smash a window. Step in front of a bus.

At the entrance to their hotel, Emily crushes through the door, slams up the stairs, not waiting for the elevator or her mother. She unlocks the bolt and throws herself facedown on her bed. When her mother enters the room, Emily does not move. Annie crosses to the window, looks out at the plaza below, hangs her jacket in the closet, careful to arrange the shoulders evenly on the hanger. Emily waits for her mother to sit down by her on the bed. She anticipates the moment when her mother will ask what’s wrong, and by God, Emily will tell her. She rehearses the rant—you don’t ask me if I want lace; you don’t ask me if I have any intention of getting married; you don’t ask me if I want to stay here. What about me? What about what I want?

Instead, Annie sits in the chair by the window and opens a book. Unbelievable. Emily shudders, her body trembling, electric beneath the skin. She hates her mother, hates her, and why won’t she come over to the bed and hold her?

The room grows darker as daylight wanes, and Annie does not move to turn on the lamp. Eventually, Emily tires of waiting for her mother to stir. She props on the edge of the bed and blows her nose in a tissue. Her mother sits in the shadows by the window, head down, the book open in her hands.

“You know what I really hate about being here?” Her mother doesn’t answer. Emily talks to the silence. “I hate the way it smells. There’s horse manure all over the streets. People throw rotting garbage out.”

No response. Emily goes on. “In that house, I had to eat pork fat. The rind. And some fish stuff that tasted like sewer.”

Still nothing. “They didn’t even try to like me. They expected me to sit at my desk every night and study. They didn’t want me to go out.”

“Did you go out?”

Emily perks up. “Yes. I went out and stayed out late. I walked home alone across the river. I drank cheap wine with hundreds of strangers in the plaza.”

“Good.”

“Good?” That hardly seems like a mother response. Back in Lincoln, her mother would have had a fit if she stayed out late drinking. With strangers!

“What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to act like a mother. My mother.”

Annie closes her book and lays it on the desk. Rubs her hands across her eyes. Emily feels a pang of guilt. How sad and small her mother looks.

Annie’s voice falls into the gap between them. “When my father died, I was only a little older than you are now.”

“Yeah, but he was sick a long time.”

“You think that makes it easier?” Her mother’s voice flares. Emily shrinks back on the bed. Everything she says seems to go wrong.

Annie takes a deep breath and begins again. “I went with your grandma to that café out on the highway in Reach, remember? Oasis, I think it’s called. Some of the widows from the church were there, Corrine, Louise, you don’t know them. We sat down. Corrine leaned across the table, looked Grandma in the eye, and said, ‘You know the deal, Iris.’ Grandma nodded her head. ‘I know the deal,’ she said. Later I asked her what Corrine meant, and Grandma said, ‘Keep busy.’”

Emily waits, expecting more. Expecting something that makes sense.

“That’s it? Keep busy. That’s the best you can do?”

“We’re looking for reasons. Everybody is, all the time, but us more than ever before.”

“What kind of reasons? Reasons Dad died?”

“No, darling. Reasons not to give up.” Annie stands, then, and turns on the desk lamp. “Now, let’s get dressed in something fancy and go out for tapas. By then, it should be time for flamenco.”

The crowded flamenco bar lifts Emily’s spirits. They are led through a series of rooms, crowded with drinkers and laughter, to a back room set up with long tables and benches, the roof a lattice of scarlet bougainvillea. Emily loves the disorder, the bumping and shoving, the singer’s lament cruising over the tops of heads. The young guitarist has dreadlocks and scruffy jeans. The older singer wears black pants, a white shirt open at the throat where he lays his hand over his heart. At the height of his performance he stands, arms gesticulating wildly in front of him. Emily’s emotions soar with him, and out of the corner of her eye, she catches sight of her mother. Annie’s not watching the flamenco artists. Instead, she’s staring at the table next to theirs where a young man is cooking a sausage over a blazing ceramic bowl.

Afterward, on the way back to their hotel, a man accosts them in the street. With little crime other than petty theft, Emily has
learned not to be afraid here, but she senses her mother’s tension. Emily takes her mother’s arm. She listens intently to the man, who talks fast while waving his arm up and down the street. She tries to walk her mother away, but the man follows them. Emily struggles to understand.

“I think he’s got us confused with someone else. He says we’ve parked our car on this street. He says he owns this street and we have to pay him.”

“Tell him we don’t have a car.”

“I did. But he says we do, and we have to pay him. I think that’s what he’s saying.”

Emily watches her mother turn her head and look down the narrow cobbled street. There’s no one in sight.

“Just give him some money.” Emily wants this over with.

“Did you put him up to this?”

“What? No.” Emily’s stomach starts to clutch. The man seems larger, more menacing. A jagged scar on his right cheek screams of knife fight. Her mother keeps on smiling, oozing her ridiculous Midwestern charm straight at the man while she speaks to Emily.

“You did, didn’t you? Part of your ploy to come home.”

The man moves closer, his voice louder. Her mother grins like an imbecile. Before Emily can think what to say to convince her mother that they are victims of extortion, Annie glances away from the man to look at her. He seizes the moment to snatch her mother’s purse. He sweeps it off her mother’s neck, but her arm catches in the strap and the man shoves her hard while he yanks the bag free. Annie cries out, falls to the cobblestone street, and Emily stands frozen inside a cartoon cel, not certain if she should run after the man or tend to her mother. While she stares after him, he throws the purse down in the street.

“Mom. Mom, are you all right?”

Her mother has one hand against her head. Blood seeps through her fingers. Her other hand points down the street. “Get my bag.”

Emily runs down the street, afraid her mother will disappear in the seconds that it takes to reach down and retrieve the bag. It’s light. He’s taken her mother’s wallet. By the time she reaches her mother, Annie’s standing, wobbly as a cheap three-legged stool.

“Did he take anything?” Blood drips down one side of Annie’s face. She grabs the purse and squeezes it.