The New Yorker Stories

Anyway, all the preliminaries to my story are nothing but that: the almost inevitable five minutes of hard rain midway through the trip; the beautiful bridge; the damned trucks expelling herculean farts. I drove to Venice, singing along with Mick Jagger about beasts of burden. When I got to my mother’s street, which is, it seems, the only quarter-mile-long stretch of America watched directly by God, through the eyes of a Florida policeman in a radar-equipped car, I set the cruise control for twenty and coasted to her driveway.

Hot as it was, my mother was outside, sitting in a lawn chair flanked by pots of red geraniums. Seeing my mother always puts me into a state of confusion. Whenever I first see her, I become disoriented.

“Ann!” she said. “Oh, are you exhausted? Was the flight terrible?”

It’s the subtext that depresses me: the assumption that to arrive anywhere you have to pass through hell. In fact, you do. I had been on a USAir flight, seated in the last seat in the last row, and every time suitcases thudded into the baggage compartment my spine reverberated painfully. My traveling companions had been an obese woman with a squirming baby and her teenage son, whose ears she squeezed when he wouldn’t settle down, producing shrieks and enough flailing to topple my cup of apple juice. I just sat there silently, and I could feel that I was being too quiet and bringing everyone down.

My mother’s face was still quite pink. Shortly before my father’s death, after she had a little skin cancer removed from above her lip, she went to the dermatologist for microdermabrasion. She was wearing the requisite hat with a wide brim and Ari Onassis sunglasses. She had on her uniform: shorts covered with a flap, so that it looked as if she were wearing a skirt, and a T-shirt embellished with sequins. Today’s featured a lion with glittering black ears and, for all I knew, a correctly colored nose. Its eyes, which you might think would be sequins, were painted on. Blue.

“Love you,” I said, hugging her. I had learned not to answer her questions. “Were you sitting out here in the sun waiting for me?”

She had learned, as well, not to answer mine. “We can have lemonade,” she said. “Paul Newman. And that man’s marinara sauce—I never cook it myself anymore.”

The surprise came almost immediately, just after she pressed a pile of papers into my hands: thank-you notes from friends she wanted me to read; a letter she didn’t understand regarding a magazine subscription that was about to expire; an ad she’d gotten about a vacuum cleaner she wanted my advice about buying; two tickets to a Broadway play she’d bought ten years before that she and my father had never used (what was being asked of me?); and—most interesting, at the bottom of the pile—a letter from Drake Dreodadus, her neighbor, asking her to move in with him. “Go for the vacuum instead,” I said, trying to laugh it off.

“I’ve already made my response,” she said. “And you may be very surprised to know what I said.”

Drake Dreodadus had spoken at my father’s memorial service. Before that, I had met him only once, when he was going over my parents’ lawn with a metal detector. But no: as my mother reminded me, I’d had a conversation with him in the drugstore, one time when she and I stopped in to buy medicine for my father. He was a pharmacist.

“The only surprising thing would be if you’d responded in the affirmative,” I said.

“ ‘Responded in the affirmative!’ Listen to you.”

“Mom,” I said, “tell me this is not something you’d give a second of thought to.”

“Several days of thought,” she said. “I decided that it would be a good idea, because we’re very compatible.”

“Mom,” I said, “you’re joking, right?”

“You’ll like him when you get to know him,” she said.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “This is someone you hardly know—or am I being naive?”

“Oh, Ann, at my age you don’t necessarily want to know someone extremely well. You want to be compatible, but you can’t let yourself get all involved in the dramas that have already played out—all those accounts of everyone’s youth. You just want to be—you want to come to the point where you’re compatible.”

I was sitting in my father’s chair. The doilies on the armrests that slid around and drove him crazy were gone. I looked at the darker fabric, where they had been. Give me a sign, Dad, I was thinking, looking at the shiny fabric as if it were a crystal ball. I was clutching my glass, which was sweating. “Mom—you can’t be serious,” I said.

She winked.

“Mom—”

“I’m going to live in his house, which is on the street perpendicular to Palm Avenue. You know, one of the big houses they built at first, before the zoning people got after them and they put up these little cookie-cutter numbers.”

“You’re moving in with him?” I said, incredulous. “But you’ve got to keep this house. You are keeping it, aren’t you? If it doesn’t work out.”

“Your father thought he was a fine man,” she said. “They used to be in a Wednesday-night poker game, I guess you know. If your father had lived, Drake was going to teach him how to e-mail.”

“With a, with—you don’t have a computer,” I said stupidly.

“Oh, Ann, I wonder about you sometimes. As if your father and I couldn’t have driven to Circuit City, bought a computer—and he could have e-mailed you! He was excited about it.”

“Well, I don’t—” I seemed unable to finish any thought. I started again. “This could be a big mistake,” I said. “He only lives one block away. Is it really necessary to move in with him?”

“Was it necessary for you to live with Richard Klingham in Vermont?”

I had no idea what to say. I had been staring at her. I dropped my eyes a bit and saw the blue eyes of the lion. I dropped them to the floor. New rug. When had she bought a new rug? Before or after she made her plans?

“When did he ask you about this?” I said.