my own.”
“You take care, now!” she says, and hangs up.
“She’s where?”
“Right here in my office. She was on a bench in Lee Park. Someone saw her talking to a woman who was drunk—a street person—just before the cops arrived. The woman was throwing bottles she’d gotten out of a restaurant’s recycling at the statue. Your mother said she was keeping score. The woman was winning, the statue losing. The woman had blood all over her face, so eventually somebody called the cops.”
“Blood all over her face?”
“She’d cut her fingers picking up glass after she threw it. It was the other woman who was bloody.”
“Oh, God, my mother’s okay?”
“Yes, but we need to act. I’ve called the Oaks. They can’t do anything today, but tomorrow they can put her in a semiprivate for three nights, which they aren’t allowed to do, but never mind. Believe me: once she’s in there, they’ll find a place.”
“I’ll be right there.”
“Hold on,” he says. “We need to have a plan. I don’t want her at your place: I want her hospitalized tonight, and I want an MRI. Tomorrow morning, if there’s no problem, you can take her to the Oaks.”
“What’s the point of scaring her to death? Why does she have to be in a hospital?”
“She’s very confused. It won’t be any help if you don’t get to sleep tonight.”
“I feel like we should—”
“You feel like you should protect your mother, but that’s not really possible, is it? She was picked up in Lee Park. Fortunately, she had my business card and her beautician’s card clipped to a shopping list that contains—it’s right in front of me—items such as Easter eggs and arsenic.”
“Arsenic? Was she going to poison herself ?”
There is a moment of silence. “Let’s say she was,” he says, “for the sake of argument. Now, come and pick her up, and we can get things rolling.”
Tim and Cora were getting married by a justice of the peace at approximately the same time that “Mom” was tracking bottles in Lee Park; they converge on the hospital room with Donna Milrus, who whispers apologetically that her husband is “playing doctor” and avoiding visiting hours.
Cora’s wedding bouquet is in my mother’s water pitcher. Tim cracks his knuckles and clears his throat repeatedly. “They got upset that I’d been sitting in the park. Can you imagine?” my mother says suddenly to the assembled company. “Do you think we’re going to have many more of these desperate fall days?”
The next morning, only Tim and I are there to get her into his rental car and take her to the Oaks. Our mother sits in front, her purse on her lap, occasionally saying something irrational, which I finally figure out is the result of her reading vanity license plates aloud.
From the back seat, I look at the town like a visitor. There’s much too much traffic. People’s faces inside their cars surprise me: no one over the age of twenty seems to have a neutral, let alone happy, expression. Men with jutting jaws and women squinting hard pass by. I find myself wondering why more of them don’t wear sunglasses, and whether that might not help. My thoughts drift: the Gucci sunglasses I lost in London; the time I dressed as a skeleton for Halloween. In childhood, I appeared on Halloween as Felix the Cat, as Jiminy Cricket (I still have the cane, which I often pull out of the closet, mistaking it for an umbrella), and as a tomato.
“You know,” my mother says to my brother, “your father had an entire family before he met us. He never mentioned them, either. Wasn’t that cruel? If we’d met them, we might have liked them, and vice versa. Your sister gets upset if I say that’s the case, but everything you read now suggests that it’s better if the families meet. You have a ten-year-old brother from that first family. You’re too old to be jealous of a child, aren’t you? So there’s no reason why you wouldn’t get along.”
“Mom,” he says breathlessly.
“Your sister tells me every time we see each other that she’s fifty-one. She’s preoccupied with age. Being around an old person can do that. I’m old, but I forget to think about myself that way. Your sister is in the back seat right now thinking about mortality, mark my words.”
My brother’s knuckles are white on the wheel.
“Are we going to the hairdresser?” she says suddenly. She taps the back of her neck. Her fingers move up until they encounter small curls. When Tim realizes that I’m not going to answer, he says, “Your hair looks lovely, Mom. Don’t worry about it.”
“Well, I always like to be punctual when I have an appointment,” she says.
I think how strange it is that I was never dressed up as Cleopatra, or as a ballerina. What was wrong with me that I wanted to be a tomato?
“Ma, on Halloween, was I ever dressed as a girl?”
In the mirror, my brother’s eyes dart to mine. For a second, I remember Vic’s eyes as he checked my reactions in the rearview mirror, those times I had my mother sit up front so the two of them could converse more easily.
“Well,” my mother says, “I think one year you thought about being a nurse, but Joanne Willoughby was going to be a nurse. I was in the grocery store, and there was Mrs. Willoughby, fingering the costume we’d thought about the night before. It was wrong of me not to be more decisive. I think that’s what made you impulsive as a grown-up.”
“You think I’m impulsive? I think of myself as somebody who never does anything unexpected.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” my mother says. “Look at that man you married when you didn’t even really know him. The first husband. And then you married that man you knew way back in high school. It makes me wonder if you didn’t inherit some of your father’s fickle tendencies.”
