Still Here (9 page)

It can't be like this, Regina had thought back when she was laboring over the sentences. It can't possibly be the same for everybody!

But apparently it was like that. And it was the same for everybody. Regina's mother took to her bed three weeks before she died. “Regina, can I sleep for a little while longer?” she would ask with the pleading expression of a young child. Two weeks before she died she stopped eating. “Oh, yes, this soup is very good, can I finish it later?” Shortly after that the confusion set in. “How do you tell time? Take this clock, what are you supposed to do with the numbers? Add them up?” And then: “Are you my mother? But you are!”

She would refer to Regina as her mother more and more often, the closer to death she got.

“Mama, where were you?”

“I just went to the bathroom.”

“But I wanted you. I cried—that's how much I wanted you!”

Is this the only experience of motherhood I'm going to get? Regina thought as she turned away to hide her tears. She tried to feel maternal as she stroked the warm fluff on her mother's head; as she held her hand, shriveled and cold like an autumn leaf; as she whispered “It's okay.” She couldn't. She didn't feel like a mother; she felt like a child instead, a frightened, abandoned child.

On the day of her death, her mother's eyes lost focus and filmed over. Then her feet and hands became a mottled bluish-purple. Then she died.

She hit all the marks described in that book.

There was something insulting, something demeaning, about the universality of death. Regina's mother, who had always refused to follow the rules and live her life like everybody else, couldn't escape dying exactly like everybody else. Regina plunged into depression and anger. Or, rather, she wallowed in anger while she had the strength and sank into depression when the anger exhausted her.

Her mother's old friends took care of the funeral and tried to take care of Regina as well, but she couldn't bear their attention. Aunt Masha was especially persistent. Regina had to tell her she was going to visit her father in Canada and she said the same thing to her editor Inga, to avoid their visits and calls. The truth was that she didn't even tell her father. She didn't tell her friends either. She had mentioned that her mother was sick, but she didn't tell them how serious it was. And when her mother died, Regina simply couldn't bear making that phone call. “Vadik, my mom died.” “Sergey, my mom died.” “Vica, my mom died.” The mere thought of dialing a number and saying those words out loud made her shudder with revulsion. How could you possibly express the horror of what had happened in those three ordinary words? Regina abandoned her work, ignored her e-mails, didn't answer the phone, and just stayed on the sofa crying until she fell asleep. She barely ate. She'd lost eighteen pounds by the time Vadik knocked on her door about six weeks after the funeral. He had a connection in Moscow on his way back to New York from Minsk, where he was interviewing some Belarusian programmers, and he had tried to contact Regina, but since she wasn't answering her phone or e-mails, he'd come to her place. She was so weak from hunger and exhaustion that she could barely make it to the door. “Vadik,” Regina said when she opened the door, “my mom died,” and folded over sobbing. Vadik canceled his plans, changed his return ticket, and stayed in her apartment for about a week, and then he insisted that she visit all of them in New York. He even offered to pay for her ticket and help with the visa.

Regina told all of this to Bob during the period of insatiable intimacy they had in the first couple of months of their relationship. They were cuddled against each other on the huge sofa in Bob's apartment. They had been talking for hours; it had gotten late and the room had gone dark, but they didn't bother to get up and turn on the lights.

“I still don't know what it was,” Regina said. “Did she subconsciously want to punish me for trying to get away? Or was this a gift of freedom? She knew how much I needed freedom, but she understood that she wouldn't be able to give it to me while she was alive. So she had to die.”

“Or maybe it was neither,” Bob said, stroking her hair. “She could've died because it was her time. People die. They don't do it on purpose, and they don't do it for somebody else.”

The
swoosh
that Bob's fingers made when they went over her ears reminded her of the sound of the sea. It was amazingly soothing.

Bob said that Regina's mother was actually very lucky to have died like that, at home, in her own bed, in the presence of her daughter. Most people he knew died in hospitals, hooked to machines, surrounded by strangers, rendered speechless by trach tubes—no last words there. When his father was dying, Bob's older brother, Chuck, kept screaming at the doctors to “do everything,” to “use every fucking heroic measure!” They broke two of his father's ribs performing CPR. Bob told her, “You can't imagine how much he suffered.” Later, he recounted all that to his shrink, and the shrink sighed and said, “Yep. Death is not what it used to be.”

Bob had never loved his father that much, but his death devastated him. The man had been a driving force behind Bob's many endeavors. The family legend was that when Bob's father saw Bob for the first time in the hospital, he had winced and said, “He's nothing like Chuck!” Chuck was already the best and the biggest student in his kindergarten class. He could count to one hundred and kick the ball far into the bushes. Bob's shrink told him that in a way this made Bob's life easier, because if you're born as a disappointment there's no crippling pressure to succeed. Perhaps he was right. Bob's biggest aspiration was not to succeed but to live his life in a completely different way. Bob went to an East Coast university, moved to New York, aligned himself with liberal politics, entered the IT field, and married a difficult woman.

“I mean my first wife, honey,” he explained to Regina, “she was a real piece of work.” And Regina felt momentarily jealous. Was she less challenging, less interesting than Bob's ex?

“So when my father died, I felt lost, perfectly empty, as if my life was stripped of purpose. I felt as if I had been living my life for my father, even if my main goal was to defy him. I think I felt depressed for about a year.

“When my mom died, it was different. I loved her more, and the pain of losing her was way, way more intense. Once, something reminded me of her smell—she had a very particular smell, clean and dry like freshly sawed wood—and I started to cry like a baby. She was very reserved. Loved to read more than anything else. Actually, you remind me of her a little bit.”

That's alarming, Regina thought, but the tenderness of Bob's tone reassured her.

“My mom wasn't a very warm person. I don't think she ever kissed us unless we were sick. I used to believe that her kisses were a legitimate medical solution. Once I had a fever in school and the nurse gave me some aspirin, then later asked me if I was feeling better. And I said, ‘No! My mother didn't kiss me!' ”

“Bob, honey!” Regina said.

“Yes, I was very sad when my mother died, but I wasn't devastated. It wasn't as if my life stopped, which was how I felt when my father died. But the real horror reached me a few months after her death. I was at a dinner party with my old friends. Everyone's in their late forties just like me. And then it hit me that I was the only person in the room with both parents dead. There was nobody between me and death anymore. No protective layers. I was next in line. I've never felt more scared or exposed.”

Bob had slid down and was lying on the sofa with his head in Regina's lap. Regina leaned down to kiss him and her hair fell over his face as if to shield him from the horror, to create that protective layer he was seeking. She felt an affection for Bob swelling inside her, pushing against her rib cage, hurting her.

That memory never failed to move her. “Bob, sweetheart,” Regina said out loud, looking in the direction of the Hudson.

A baby's cooing broke into Regina's reverie.

“Now look at the nice lady! Is that a nice lady? Yes, it is! Yes, it is! Let's wave to her.”

Regina turned to her right. On the next terrace over, there was a woman with a baby in her arms. Theirs would be the perfect neighborhood if it wasn't for all the kids. Everybody seemed to come there to have a child. The woman was swinging the baby's little hand so it would appear that the baby was waving to Regina. Regina gave the baby and the mother a Soviet-style young pioneer salute, picked up her empty cup, and headed inside.

Regina closed the balcony door behind her and walked over to the bookshelves. They had a whole wall of built-in shelves—Bob had installed them as a wedding gift to Regina, to house the books she'd brought from Russia. Old editions of Russian poetry, her mother's translations, all the European classics, Soviet relics—like a
samizdat
copy of Solzhenitsyn. But there were also several shelves devoted to the American books she'd been meaning to read ever since she moved to the U.S. The novel
Infinite Jest
had the most handled cover, because this was the book she'd made the most attempts to read. Every time Regina opened it, she would be knocked out by its sheer brilliance. And the language! Reading
Infinite Jest
was such a powerful experience for Regina that she couldn't read more than a few pages without stopping to take a rest. A long rest. More often than not, Regina wouldn't resume reading it for months. But that book wasn't the only one that presented a problem. There were shorter, less draining books on her shelf that didn't fare much better. Claire Messud's
The Emperor's Children.
Joseph O'Neill's
Netherland.
Back in Russia she would have finished novels like these in a couple of days. She traced her fingers over their worn-out spines, pulled out
Infinite Jest,
and sat down on the sofa trying to summon the energy to start reading. The energy refused to be summoned. Regina remembered that she hadn't had breakfast yet. Breakfast should help! she thought, leaving the book on the sofa and walking into the kitchen.

She wouldn't eat a big, distracting breakfast. She wasn't even hungry. She would just drink some more coffee—enough to give her the necessary energy for reading—and reward herself with food after she had finished a certain number of pages. She made herself a fresh pot of coffee. The coffee was good. In fact, it was so good that it would be a shame to consume it quickly. Regina put the coffee on a tray and carried it to the living room. She placed the tray on the coffee table, sat down on the couch, and clicked on the remote. Now what would be the perfect show to watch while drinking coffee? She knew where to get her answer. She had an app, this secret piece of joy that she had hidden from Bob on her phone. The problem was that the idea for the app had been Bob's young assistant's. He had pitched it to Bob and Bob had rejected it on the spot. More than that, Bob had laughed at it. Well, the assistant had gone ahead and pitched it to somebody else, who had developed it, and the app had became incredibly successful. Bob was still reeling. “I've misjudged the American consumer,” he liked to complain. “We are even lazier and more stupid than we think we are.”

Bob's assistant had called his app “Dinner and a Movie,” but the company that developed it renamed it “Eat'n'Watch,” because they thought that “Dinner and a Movie” was too outdated and too limiting. Why not watch a movie while eating breakfast or lunch? “My thoughts exactly,” Regina had confessed to Vadik once.

You picked a movie or a TV program on Eat'n'Watch, then it suggested the best food to eat while watching it and helped you order it from a neighborhood restaurant. The app saved and studied your preferences too, so that after a few months of working together, it seemed to know you better than you knew yourself. And sometimes even better than you wanted to know yourself, thought Regina. Eat'n'Watch asked you to rate the shows and the food, but it never actually based its suggestions on your rating system. The algorithm was based solely on the frequency of your ordering a certain item or on the time you spent enjoying it. Eat'n'Watch got you what you truly liked, not what you wanted to think that you liked. For example, Regina would give five-star ratings to Bergman and Rohmer and healthy salads, but based on the frequency of her orders, Eat'n'Watch knew that she really liked pizza, hamburgers, the greasiest items on Chinese menus, and American TV series like
Seinfeld, Friends,
and
Cheers.

“How about the TV series
Blameless,
about a mousy wife and mother secretly running a chain of adult-only resorts (Season 1, Episode 1), and the Lumberjack Special from Just Food on Leonard Street?” Eat'n'Watch was asking her now.

That shit and the Lumberjack? Really? Why do you think of me so meanly? Regina thought. She wasn't even planning to have a big breakfast, yet the second the suggestion was made she realized that this was exactly what she wanted—some fast-paced, juicy, and brainless show, accompanied by a deliciously satisfying amount of sugar, salt, and fat.

She pressed the Okay button. That's how effortless it was. All she needed to do was to turn on her TV and wait for the delivery person.

The problem was that Regina could never synchronize the time it took her to watch an episode with the time it took her to consume food. By the time episode one of
Blameless
ended, she still had one pancake, two strips of bacon, and some home fries left. She could just eat them in dumb silence like an animal, like a stupid zombie, or she could do the more civilized thing and turn on episode two. Regina chose to do the latter. Episode two was even better than the first episode, because that was when those blonde PTA bitches started to suspect that the main character was involved in something clandestine. Imagine Regina's disappointment when she reached for a bacon strip in the middle of a very important scene and found out that there was none left. She clicked Pause. It was unthinkable to watch this shit for the sake of watching it. Or, rather, it was impossible to enjoy it without food. Regina thought of those Pavlovian dogs that started to salivate when they heard a bell, because they were used to hearing the bell right before the scientists brought them food. Physiological reflexes—blah blah blah. It was the same with her. Regina was so used to watching TV while eating, and eating while watching TV, that her mouth wouldn't salivate unless there was something on the screen, and her brain wouldn't accept video and audio stimulation unless she was eating. Eat'n'Watch had a solution—an excellent Cobb salad from Parsley, just around the corner. Regina sighed, added some extra blue cheese to her order, and pressed Okay.