WHAT WOULD HER MOTHER do, Maria wondered, if she were to stand right in front of her, make sure she had her attention, and then say, “Mother. Help.”
It was late Sunday afternoon, and they were driving to her mother’s house.
Richard began humming to himself. Maria imagined that she felt the vibration of his humming in the cushiony part of her own lips, closed upon themselves. It was an aimless, tuneless creation that he was humming. Maria thought it a pity that they weren’t a family that sang together. Instead they took turns, while driving: Richard would hum for a while, then Belinda would sing to herself, gazing out the side window and daydreaming about fame, fortune, and what she would call love, although it was really sex. Then it would be Maria’s turn, but by then she would no longer be in the mood, or the other two would have decided they wanted to talk.
She didn’t know what kind of help she would ask of her mother, were she to ask.
Maria shifted on her seat and leaned close to the window. She didn’t like riding in a car that was being driven by somebody else. Driving was one of her favorite things. Why was it that male people, most of them, anyway, always assumed that if there was driving to be done, they were naturally the ones who’d be doing it?
Ignoring Richard’s humming, Maria began to sing. “‘Moonbeams shining,’” she sang, “‘soft above, let me beg of you; find the one I dearly love, tell him I’ll e’er be true.’”
Richard glanced at her, and even though she didn’t look at him, she knew it was a look of surprise that was about to become disapproval.
“‘Fate may part us,’” she sang more loudly, “‘years may pass, future all unknown.’” He had stopped humming now. “‘Still my heart will always be faithful to him alone.’”
“That’s pretty, Mom,” said Belinda from the backseat.
Maria turned to smile at her and aimed the rest of the song in her daughter’s direction. “‘O wandering wind, won’t you quickly find my dear one where’er he may be. And give him a message I fain would send; I know that he’s dreaming of me. Fate may part us,’” she sang (and Belinda sang along, “‘La la la-la, la la la’”), “‘years may pass, future all unknown. Still my heart will always be faithful to him alone.’”
“You pick one now, Dad,” said Belinda, leaning toward the front seat.
Maria, looking again out the window, had a spasm of heartache. She touched the inside of the glass, following with her fingertip the trail left on the outside by a drop of rain. It was probably some hormonal thing, this apprehension that had come to afflict her.
“‘There was a man,’” said Richard. “This isn’t a song, mind you. Because I don’t sing.”
“I know, Dad,” said Belinda. “It’s a recitative.”
“Precisely,” he said. “‘There was a man’”—Belinda joined in—“‘whose name was Mertz.’”
Maria gazed at him in astonishment. He hadn’t sung this in years.
“‘His wife bought him. Some colored shirts. He bought a goat. To please his kids. And this is what. That poor goat did. He ate the shirts. Right off the line. But Mrs. Mertz caught him in time. She tied him to. The railroad tracks. And swore she would. Those shirts get back. He coughed and kicked. With might and main. Coughed up the shirts. And flagged the train.’ I don’t know if we got that altogether right,” said Richard to Belinda. He reached across the seat and took Maria’s hand. She let him hold it; they were pulling up in front of her mother’s house.
Maria’s mother lived in the Dunbar area, not far from Forty-first Avenue, in the house in which Maria had grown up after they’d moved to Vancouver from Winnipeg. Her mother’s name was Agatha. She was an angular woman of sixty-nine who had recently taken up speed-walking. Her husband, Thomas, Maria’s father, was dead.
Agatha kept very busy with her speed-walking (she was a member of a club) and volunteer work with Mothers Against Drunk Driving. She had once been a teacher and enjoyed conversations with Richard in which he would tell her about innovations in education and she would say that these weren’t innovations: innovations had to be new.
She met them at the door, wearing tights, a long black cardigan over a white T-shirt, and a headband. On her feet were clunky black walking shoes. “You’re early!” she exclaimed, but they weren’t. Maria knew that Agatha had just wanted to be sure they saw her in her speed-walking gear.
“We can drive around the block a few times, if you like,” said Richard. Maria’s fondness for him was never greater than during visits with her mother.
“No no no, come in, come in.” Agatha kissed Belinda on both cheeks and bent to do the same to Maria.
They were all crowded together in the tiny foyer, from which a narrow staircase led upstairs. There were three bedrooms and a bath up there, plus a large square hall.
Agatha ushered them into the living room. “I have to dash upstairs and quickly shower and change,” she said. “Sit down, sit down.”
“Mother, how about if I make some coffee?” said Maria, and not waiting for a reply, she went through into the kitchen.
It had been years and years since she’d lived with her mother, but it still surprised her that Agatha lived alone apparently happily, and quite differently from when she’d had a family. Maria pondered this, staring into a cupboard. Things were put away differently. The house was messier. There was a patina of carelessness over everything. But maybe her mother was more carefree than careless, Maria thought, brooding. Agatha was to Maria an inscrutable person. There was more to her than that which Maria was willing to know. She wondered if Belinda felt the same way about her.
She put the coffee on, then sat at the table in the sunny alcove that overlooked her mother’s backyard. She was thinking about what life with her parents had been like when she was a child, a teenager, a coming-and-going adult, a married person. The life she studied was, of course, a Maria-centered life: it was mildly shocking to realize that things had been going on in her mother’s life, too, all those years. She felt slightly guilty not to have thought about this much earlier. And slightly irritated that her mother had not thought to tell her. The point was, did she really know her mother? Where had all this speed-walking come from? Did Agatha miss having sex? Maria stared thoughtfully out the window, absently noting the mess that was her mother’s overgrown back garden. She herself thought that she would be able to do without sex quite well. But maybe that was only because it was, theoretically, always available to her.
In the living room, Belinda was playing the piano. Richard would be standing, hands clasped behind his back, watching his daughter’s hands on the piano keys. But soon he would move to the front window and then out the front door, to check something in the car or to walk to the corner and back. Richard hated to be idle. Idleness soured his digestive system. Which was why he had a problem with holidays. Christmas was especially bad. Maria had established several rituals for Christmas Day, most of which were designed to keep Richard busy, to give him a sense of purpose. Richard really wanted to feel a sense of destiny, but purpose would do.
Agatha came downstairs smelling like Pears soap and Yardley’s lavender. Maria could just see her, standing there on the bathmat, vigorously toweling herself dry, spreading deodorant in her armpits and slapping talcum powder all over her aged body. She was surprised and depressed to realize that she envied her mother, who was active and fit and, as far as Maria could tell, without a care in the world. Maria felt wan and driven by comparison.
“Have some coffee, Mom,” she said, but Agatha opted for fruit juice.
They sat in the living room, making conversation, and it felt to Maria that the three of them had dropped in unannounced: you’d never know, she thought, that the woman had invited us for dinner.
Upstairs there was a bedroom that used to be Maria’s. Now it was what her mother called her “ideas room.” It was full of projects, some new, some old, some abandoned. There was a sewing machine in it, and a knitting machine, and a computer.
Maria would have liked to have a nest somewhere—a den—another home—a refuge, for her imagination as much as for her self—a hidey-hole—a place to which she could flee. She thought about this, idly watching her mother drink her orange juice, and noticed that Agatha had lost more weight.
She looked more closely at her mother, and Agatha must have felt this, because she gazed back at her. Richard was talking, Belinda was yawning and taking peeks into the kitchen, as if wanting to find out whether dinner were actually happening. Maria studied her mother’s face, and Agatha looked back, steadily, calmly.
And Maria knew in that moment that Agatha was dying.