“Let’s not fight,” my brother says.
“What do you think other mothers would say if I told them both my children got married without inviting me to their weddings? I think some of them would think that must say something about me. Maybe it was my inadequacy that made your father consider us second-best. Tim, men tell other men things. Did your father tell you about the other family?”
Tim tightens his grip on the wheel. He doesn’t answer. Our mother pats his arm. She says, “Tim wanted to be Edgar Bergen one year. Do you remember? But your father pointed out that we’d have to buy one of those expensive Charlie McCarthy dolls, and he wasn’t about to do that. Little did we know, he had a whole other family to support.”
Everyone at the Oaks is referred to formally as “Mrs.” You can tell when the nurses really like someone, because they refer to her by the less formal “Miz.”
Miz Banks is my mother’s roommate. She has a tuft of pure white hair that makes her look like an exotic bird. She is ninety-nine.
“Today is Halloween, I understand,” my mother says. “Are we going to have a party?”
The nurse smiles. “Whether or not it’s a special occasion, we always have a lovely midday meal,” she says. “And we hope the family will join us.”
“It’s suppertime?” Miz Banks says.
“No, ma’am, it’s only ten a.m. right now,” the nurse says loudly. “But we’ll come get you for the midday meal, as we always do.”
“Oh, God,” Tim says. “What do we do now?”
The nurse frowns. “Excuse me?” she says.
“I thought Dr. Milrus was going to be here,” he says. He looks around the room, as if Jack Milrus might be hiding somewhere. Not possible, unless he’s wedged himself behind the desk that is sitting at an odd angle in the corner. The nurse follows his gaze and says, “Miz Banks’s nephew has feng-shuied her part of the room.”
Nearest the door—in our part of the room—there is white wicker furniture. Three pink bears teeter on a mobile hung from an air vent in the ceiling. On a bulletin board is a color picture of a baby with one tooth, grinning. Our mother has settled into a yellow chair and looks quite small. She eyes everyone, and says nothing.
“Would this be a convenient time to sign some papers?” the nurse asks. It is the second time that she has mentioned this—both times to my brother, not me.
“Oh, my God,” he says. “How can this be happening?” He is not doing very well.
“Let’s step outside and let the ladies get to know each other,” the nurse says. She takes his arm and leads him through the door. “We don’t want to be negative,” I hear her say.
I sit on my mother’s bed. My mother looks at me blankly. It is as if she doesn’t recognize me in this context. She says, finally, “Whose Greek fisherman’s cap is that?”
She is pointing to the Sony Walkman that I placed on the bed, along with an overnight bag and some magazines.
“That’s a machine that plays music, Ma.”
“No, it isn’t,” she says. “It’s a Greek fisherman’s cap.”
I pick it up and hold it out to her. I press “play,” and music can be heard through the dangling earphones. We both look at it as if it were the most curious thing in the world. I adjust the volume to low and put the earphones on her head. She closes her eyes. Finally, she says, “Is this the beginning of the Halloween party?”
“I threw you off, talking about Halloween,” I say. “Today’s just a day in early November.”
“Thanksgiving is next,” she says, opening her eyes.
“I suppose it is,” I say. I notice that Miz Banks’s head has fallen forward.
“Is that thing over there the turkey?” my mother says, pointing.
“It’s your roommate.”
“I was joking,” she says.
I realize that I am clenching my hands only when I unclench them. I try to smile, but I can’t hold up the corners of my mouth.
My mother arranges the earphones around her neck as if they were a stethoscope. “If I’d let you be what you wanted that time, maybe I’d have my own private nurse now. Maybe I wasn’t so smart, after all.”
“This is just temporary,” I lie.
“Well, I don’t want to go to my grave thinking you blame me for things that were out of my control. It’s perfectly possible that your father was a bigamist. My mother told me not to marry him.”
“Gramma told you not to marry Daddy?”
“She was a smart old fox. She sniffed him out.”
“But he never did what you accuse him of. He came home from the war and married you, and you had us. Maybe we confused you by growing up so fast or something. I don’t want to make you mad by mentioning my age, but maybe all those years that we were a family, so long ago, were like one long Halloween: we were costumed as children, and then we outgrew the costumes and we were grown.”
She looks at me. “That’s an interesting way to put it,” she says.
“And the other family—maybe it’s like the mixup between the man dreaming he’s a butterfly, or the butterfly
