The New Yorker Stories

“About a week ago,” she said.

“He did this by mail? He just wrote you a note?”

“If we’d had a computer, he could have e-mailed!” she said.

“Mom, are you being entirely serious about this?” I said. “What, exactly—”

“What, exactly, what one single thing, what absolutely compelling reason did you have for living with Richard Klingham?”

“Why do you keep saying his last name?” I said.

“Most of the old ladies I know, their daughters would be delighted if their mothers remembered a boyfriend’s first name, let alone a last name,” she said. “Senile old biddies. Really. I get sick of them myself. I see why it drives the children crazy. But I don’t want to get off on that. I want to tell you that we’re going to live in his house for a while, but are thinking seriously of moving to Tucson. He’s very close to his son, who’s a builder there. They speak every single day on the phone, and they e-mail,” she said. She was never reproachful; I decided that she was just being emphatic.

Just a short time before, I had relaxed, counting trois, deux, un. Singing with Mick Jagger. Inching slowly toward my mother’s house.

“But this shouldn’t intrude on a day meant to respect the memory of your father,” she said, almost whispering. “I want you to know, though, and I really mean it: I feel that your father would be pleased that I’m compatible with Drake. I feel it deep in my heart.” She thumped the lion’s face. “He would give this his blessing, if he could,” she said.

“Is he around?” I said.

“Listen to you, disrespecting the memory of your father by joking about his not being among us!” she said. “That is in the poorest taste, Ann.”

I said, “I meant Drake.”

“Oh,” she said. “I see. Yes. Yes, he is. But right now he’s at a matinee. We thought that you and I should talk about this privately.”

“I assume he’ll be joining us for dinner tonight?”

“Actually, he’s meeting some old friends in Sarasota. A dinner that was set up before he knew you were coming. You know, it’s a wonderful testament to a person when they retain old friends. Drake has an active social life with old friends.”

“Well, it’s just perfect for him, then. He can have his social life, and you and he can be compatible.”

“You’ve got a sarcastic streak—you always had it,” my mother said. “You might ask yourself why you’ve had fallings-out with so many friends.”

“So this is an occasion to criticize me? I understand, by the way, that you were also criticizing me when you implied that you didn’t understand my relationship with Richard—or perhaps the reason I ended it? The reason I ended it was because he and an eighteen-year-old student of his became Scientologists and asked me if I wanted to come in the van with them to Santa Monica. He dropped his cat off at the animal shelter before they set out, so I guess I wasn’t the only one to get shafted.”

“Oh!” she said. “I didn’t know!”

“You didn’t know because I never told you.”

“Oh, was it horrible for you? Did you have any idea?”

She was right, of course: I had left too many friends behind. I told myself it was because I traveled so much, because my life was so chaotic. But, really, maybe I should have sent a few more cards myself. Also, maybe I should have picked up on Richard’s philandering. Everybody else in town knew.

“I thought we could have some Paul Newman’s and then maybe when we had dessert we could light those little devotional lights and have a moment’s silence, remembering your father.”

“Fine,” I said.

“We’ll need to go to the drugstore to get candles,” she said. “They burned out the night Drake and I had champagne and toasted our future.” She stood. She put on her hat. “I can drive,” she said.

I straggled behind her like a little kid in a cartoon. I could imagine myself kicking dirt. Some man she hardly knew. It was the last thing I’d expected. “So give me the scenario,” I said. “He wrote you a note and you wrote back, and then he came for champagne?”

“Oh, all right, so it hasn’t been a great romance,” my mother said. “But a person gets tired of all the highs and lows. You get to the point where you need things to be a little easier. In fact, I didn’t write him a note. I thought about it for three days, then I just knocked on his door.”

The candles were cinnamon-scented and made my throat feel constricted. She lit them at the beginning of the meal, and by the end she seemed to have forgotten about talking about my father. She mentioned a book she’d been reading about Arizona. She offered to show me some pictures, but they, too, were forgotten. We watched a movie on TV about a dying ballerina. As she died, she imagined herself doing a pas de deux with an obviously gay actor. We ate M&M’s, which my mother has always maintained are not really candy, and went to bed early. I slept on the foldout sofa. She made me wear one of her nightgowns, saying that Drake might knock on the door in the morning. I traveled light: toothbrush, but nothing to sleep in. Drake did not knock the next morning, but he did put a note under the door saying that he had car problems and would be at the repair shop. My mother seemed very sad. “Maybe you’d want to write him a teeny little note before you go?” she said.

“What could I possibly say?”

“Well, you think up dialogue for characters, don’t you? What would you imagine yourself saying?” She put her hands to her lips. “Never mind,” she said. “If you do write, I’d appreciate it if you’d at least give me a sense of what you said.”

“Mom,” I said, “please give him my best wishes. I don’t want to write him a note.”