The New Yorker Stories

“I’m sorry I keep bothering you with this. I know I have to make a decision. It’s just that when I went back to look at the Oaks and that woman had mashed an eclair into her face—”

“It’s funny. Just look at it as funny. Kids make a mess. Old people make a mess. Some old biddy pushed her nose into a pastry.”

“Right,” I say, draining my gin-and-tonic. We are in his backyard. Inside, Donna is making her famous osso buco. “You know, I wanted to ask you something. Sometimes she says ‘desperate.’ She uses the word when you wouldn’t expect to hear it.”

“Strokes,” he says.

“But is she trying to say what she feels?”

“Does it come out like a hiccup or something?” He pulls up a weed.

“No, she just says it, instead of another word.”

He looks at the long taproot of the dandelion he’s twisted up. “The South,” he says. “These things have a horribly long growing season.” He drops it in a wheelbarrow filled with limp things raked up from the yard. “I am desperate to banish dandelions,” he says.

“No, she wouldn’t use it like that. She’d say something like, ‘Oh, it was desperate of you to ask me to dinner.’ ”

“It certainly was. You weren’t paying any attention to me on the telephone.”

“Just about ready!” Donna calls out the kitchen window. Jack raises a hand in acknowledgment. He says, “Donna’s debating whether to tell you that she saw Vic and Banderas having a fight near the dog park. Vic was knocking Banderas on the snout with a baseball cap, Donna says, and Banderas had squared off and was showing teeth. Groceries all over the street.”

“I’m amazed. I thought Banderas could do no wrong.”

“Well, things change.”

In the yard next door, the neighbor’s strange son faces the street lamp and, excruciatingly slowly, begins his many evening sun salutations.

Cora, my brother’s friend, calls me at midnight. I am awake, watching Igby Goes Down on the VCR. Susan Sarandon, as the dying mother, is a wonder. Three friends sent me the tape for my birthday. The only other time such a thing has happened was years ago, when four friends sent me Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion.

“Tim thinks that he and I should do our share and have Mom here for a vacation, which we could do in November, when the college has a reading break,” Cora says. “I would move into Tim’s condominium, if it wouldn’t offend Mom.”

“That’s nice of you,” I say. “But you know that she thinks Tim is ten years old? I’m not sure that she’d be willing to fly to Ohio to have a ten-year-old take care of her.”

“What?”

“Tim hasn’t told you about this? He wrote her a letter, recently, and she saved it to show me how good his penmanship was.”

“Well, when she gets here she’ll see that he’s a grown-up.”

“She might think it’s a Tim impostor, or something. She’ll talk to you constantly about our father’s first family.”

“I still have some Ativan from when a root canal had to be redone,” Cora says.

“Okay, look—I’m not trying to discourage you. But I’m also not convinced that she can make the trip alone. Would Tim consider driving here to pick her up?”

“Gee. My nephew is eleven, and he’s been back and forth to the West Coast several times.”

“I don’t think this is a case of packing snacks in her backpack and giving her a puzzle book for the plane,” I say.

“Oh, I am not trying to infantilize your mother. Quite the opposite: I think that if she suspects there’s doubt about whether she can do it on her own she might not rise to the occasion, but if we just . . .”

“People never finish their sentences anymore,” I say.

“Oh, gosh, I can finish,” Cora says. “I mean, I was saying that she’ll take care of herself if we assume that she can take care of herself.”

“Would a baby take care of itself if we assumed that it could?”

“Oh, my goodness!” Cora says. “Look what time it is! I thought it was nine o’clock! Is it after midnight?”

“Twelve-fifteen.”

“My watch stopped! I’m looking at the kitchen clock and it says twelve-ten.”

I have met Cora twice: once she weighed almost two hundred pounds, and the other time she’d been on Atkins and weighed a hundred and forty. Brides magazine was in the car when she picked me up at the airport. During the last year, however, her dreams have not been fulfilled.

“Many apologies,” Cora says.

“Listen,” I say. “I was awake. No need to apologize. But I don’t feel that we’ve settled anything.”

“I’m going to have Tim call you tomorrow, and I am really sorry!”

“Cora, I didn’t mean anything personal when I said that people don’t finish sentences anymore. I don’t finish