might get touchy about people wandering around in sealed crime scenes.
That left Mom.
I don’t know when my parents got old. It seems to me that they’d been vital and vigorous, kicking and carping their way through advanced middle age, until one Saturday morning when the light slanted just wrong through their living-room windows and I found myself staring, almost open-mouthed, at two senior citizens. Since then I’d listened to the commonplace complaints, watched the hearing aids appear, picked up prescriptions, chafed impatiently as my father drove more and more slowly, until the car began to go unused for months at a time, and come to realize for the first time in a largely optimistic life that things don’t always get better. The houses-we’d lived in what seemed like dozens-had dwindled to a small apartment in Santa Monica, and the luggage they’d hauled all around the world had become furniture, stacked in the living room with a thick piece of glass over it to serve as a coffee table.
My mother was sitting in the chair in which she’s spent much of her adult life, a high-backed, regal affair that is continually being reupholstered in a shade of blue indistinguishable to me from any of the previous blues. My mother, though, is capable of distinguishing among blues in much the same way Eskimos are said to be able to do with snow, and the current shade, she assures all who ask, is the most pleasing yet. Since it was early in the day by her standards-only three-fifteen-she had the Los Angeles Times spread out at her feet and about twenty of her daily sixty cigarettes pronged down and lipsticked in the cut-glass ashtray at her side.
“You’re late,” she said, leaning forward and scanning the obituaries. “Cripes, but people are dying young these days.”
“I made a few stops,” I said, “trying to squeeze in as much life as I can before the ax falls.”
“You lack focus.” She peered down at a particularly large obituary, ornamented by a photograph of a woman who had probably planted a great many fringed geraniums in her all-too-brief day. “You run around like a chicken with its head cut off. It’s the family curse.”
“I thought the family curse was drink.” She obviously wasn’t going to slip into maternal mode anytime soon, so I took the initiative and kissed her cheek. Bending over brought both the bullshot and the sore back into play. “Coffee on?”
“I made an upside-down cake.” She flicked the newspaper noisily with her index finger and made a clucking noise. “Only sixty-three.”
I crossed the small living room to the kitchen. “What the hell is this, hot water?”
“Caffeine’s bad for you,” she said complacently. “Especially if you lack focus. The Chinese drink lots of hot water. Ask Eleanor.”
“I’m going to close my eyes and name the presidents, and when I get to Madison there’ll be real coffee in this pot.”
She heaved a sigh, preparatory to getting up. “I spoiled you,” she said.
“It was the piano lessons,” I said, sticking my finger into the upside-down cake.
“I never gave you piano lessons. Take your finger out of there this minute.”
“That’s what I mean.” My finger was sticky, brown, and sweet with caramelized sugar, a taste that took me back to a time when I had barely been able to reach the counter. “If you’d forced me to take piano lessons, I might have developed some character.”
“Actually, I wanted you to take lessons. Your father said no. Said the scales would drive him stark staring mad.”
“And then there was the piano.” I put my finger back into the cake as she ladled a tablespoon of instant espresso into a cup and then added some more, direct from the jar. My mother’s coffee was a cardiologist’s nightmare.
“What piano?” She sloshed water into the cup, getting most of it on the counter. “Hell’s bells,” she said.
“The one we didn’t have.”
“That was your father, too,” my mother said. She leaned against the sink and took an absentminded sip of my coffee. “ ‘If the boy wants to play something,’ he said, ‘get him a harmonica. At least we’ll have someplace to put it.’”
I took the cup from her hand. “You could have talked him into it.”
“He’s a stubborn man. I tried. Got him up to a ukelele before he dug his heels in. Is that strong enough?”
“It’d raise the dead.”
“Sweet words from my sweet son.” She patted me on the cheek in a brisk, businesslike fashion and scanned the counter. “Did I have a cigarette?”
“Since I came in, you mean?”
“I’ve taken to putting them down and walking away. It worries your father.”
“And so it might. Where is he?”
“At the golf course.”
“Dad doesn’t play golf.”
“He likes to laugh at their trousers. Why is it that old men become such fools?”
“Ask me in a few years.”
She started to roll her eyes, thought better of it, and blinked. “You have to mature before you get old.”
“Ah. We’re getting to it, are we?”
She sat in her chair and pushed the newspaper aside with her foot. “Of course,” she said, putting a cigarette to her lips and lighting it, “you may have matured since I saw you last.”
“I was here last week.”
“I sometimes ask myself what I did wrong. Other women don’t need to make an appointment to see their sons.” She reached out and folded the paper, signaling that I had her full attention. “Do you still see that nice Peggy whatshername?”
I sat on the couch and blew on my coffee. “The last time I saw Peggy, I was sixteen.”
“Such a pretty girl.”
“As I recall, you said she reminded you of Secretariat.”
She didn’t even blink. “Horsy women,” she said, “breed well.”
There was absolutely no point in trying to hurry her, so I took a sip of coffee and felt my throat close involuntarily against the strength of it.
“And Eleanor. Is she still putting up with you?”
The coffee was as bitter as aloes, whatever they are. “Not very well.”
My mother shook her head. “We’re not a very communicative family, are we? And most Irish talk so.”
“So what about Eleanor?”
She blew smoke at me. “Such a pretty girl.”
“I thought that was Peggy.”
“Peggy looked like a horse,” she said. “And not a very attractive horse, at that.”
“I’ll just bet,” I said, “that you sent Dad to the golf course.”
She tapped ash into the crystal. “Why don’t you marry Eleanor?”
I lifted the lethal cup from the saucer, but it didn’t get to my lips. “I’ll be damned,” I said. “It’s you.”
My mother examined her cigarette as though she suspected it might have a tear in it. “Don’t swear. What’s me?”
“My mail. All that junk aimed at people who are tying the knot, as you usually say. All those phone calls.”
“You’re confusing me. Are we talking about mail, or-”
“You know perfectly well what we’re talking about. How did you do it?” I didn’t have much hope of getting a straight answer; my mother regards the truth as something you tell when you can’t think of anything more entertaining, but she surprised me.
“I went to Bullock’s,” she said. “I registered you for china and silver. They sell their mailing lists, you know.”
“What in the world motivated-”
She squinted at me through the smoke. “You’re not as young as you used to be, you know.”
I made the cup clatter against the saucer. “My God. That had never occurred to me.”
