“I could eat a cat,” Ida said, as Victor wheeled her to her place at the head of the table. “I’ve never been so hungry. They don’t feed you in the hospital. Do you know what people die of in the hospital? Nicky? Do you? Malnutrition!” She lifted one arm and plucked the loose skin. “I’m malnutrified. Do you know what size this dress is? Kay? Do you? Six. Size six. I haven’t worn a size six since I was nineteen.”
“You were nineteen for five years,” Francis reminded her.
“Oh joke, joke. Now I’m the same size as Glo Sinclair.”
“Mrs. Sinclair’s a two,” Stacy said. “But you’re cuter than her.”
Ida’s smile faltered, then flew through the candlelight. “She,” she corrected. “I’m cuter than she.” She paused, delighted with herself. “I really am, too, aren’t I?”
Stacy laughed and patted the chair next to her for Nicky, who slipped into it shyly. Francis said, “What’s this? Eating again? I thought we ate yesterday,” and wandered off down the hall. Victor stared into the candle flames, silent. Kay raced back and forth with the salad, bread, plates of steaming bourguignon, a special platter of lentils and steamed vegetables for Neal. She set it down and went to see where he was; he might still be watching the football game. But then she heard his voice in the hall, talking to Francis, which was odd, because after the first few attempts, he and Francis had settled into silence years ago. But now he was going on and on, using that monotone she hated so. It must have irritated Francis too, for she heard him say, impatient, “Not now, later, come into the office and we’ll talk about it next week,” and then the two of them appeared, expressionless, and took their places. Kay tried to catch Neal’s eye—what was going on?—but he ignored her. She hoped it wasn’t about money. She had made him promise years ago never to ask her parents for money.
She sat down, shook her napkin out and touched her fork, waiting for Ida to take the first bite. But Ida sat with her head bent, not moving. So did Stacy, Victor, and, after a second, Nicky and Neal. Kay appealed to Francis but Francis only shrugged. Scowling, she bent her own head. They had never said grace when she was growing up.
“We thank you Dear Lord,” Victor intoned, “for returning my mother home safe from the hospital after her successful leg treatment and we celebrate her return to good health with the fruits of Thy bounty. Amen.”
“Amen,” said Ida.
“Leg treatment?” Kay stopped at Neal’s warning look and tried not to laugh. This was probably what he meant by her “tricks.”
“When can we hear your concert?” Stacy said, after a minute. “Ida says you’re going to play with an orchestra.”
“It’s not a real concert.” Kay reached for her wine and took a deep sip. “And it’s not a real orchestra. Just some people from town. We sound pretty awful so far.” She watched Victor cut a piece of meat and chew it, intent. “I have more formal training, with my one year at the conservatory, than anyone else in the group,” she added. “If that tells you anything.”
“The director’s in love with her,” Neal said.
“Well of course,” said Ida. “Who wouldn’t be? You big fool,” she added under her breath.
“You used fresh thyme,” Victor announced.
“Yes.” Kay waited.
“It makes all the difference.” Victor continued his slow, thoughtful chewing. “Where’d you find it?”
“I grow it.”
Victor nodded, swallowed, said, “Good.” Kay sat back, ridiculously relieved, and took another sip of wine. Ida, beside her, ate with quick inept greed, her knife scraping back and forth on her plate, food falling off her overfilled fork.
“Oh damn,” Ida said, tearful. “I’ve gone and spilled on my new size six. Nicky, mon cher, would you do me a favor? Come here and tie a bib around my neck?” Nicky glanced at Kay, who nodded. He stood up slowly. “You always think I’m going to bite you,” Ida complained. She handed him her napkin. “Now just tie it around my neck as if I were a baby.” She opened her mouth wide and flapped her hands. “Waaaa,” she cried. “Waaaa. Waaaa.” Nicky bent his head and tied. “That’s good,” Ida said. “You’re a good baby bib tier.”
“Now you can spill as much as you want to, dear,” Francis said from his end of the table.
“It’s too good to spill.” Ida looked directly at Kay. “You don’t know how hungry I’ve been.”
Her voice was flat and factual and Kay, held by her darkened gaze, paused, hearing the truth. Every so often she saw her mother’s life as it really was, stripped of its glamour and clownishness. Just the hard, quiet, bare-boards life of an invalid. Tomorrow, Kay thought, while we’re all out in the world, she will still be in that wheelchair, alone, in pain, and she will still be there the day after and the day after that. She will never walk or run again. She’s stuck. It’s real. And it’s terrible! Terrible! She looked away.
“Speaking of spilling,” Ida said loudly, and laughed, for Nicky just then tipped over his milk. Kay hurried to the kitchen for a sponge. When she returned, Ida was saying, “Sticky Nicky, Sticky Nicky”; Neal was saying, “That’s what happens when you give kids milk”; Victor was saying, “Our church raised four hundred dollars to buy dry milk for children in Tanzania”; Stacy was saying, “They sent us the cutest thank-you letter”; and Francis was saying, “Kay used to throw her milk out the window to get rid of it. Don’t know why she thought we wouldn’t notice the hydrangeas turning white.”
Victor gave his insincere salesman’s laugh and cleared his throat. “I remember I threw a fried egg out the window once and Dad brought it back inside on a garden trowel and made Kay eat it.”
“Why did she have to eat it?” Nicky asked, interested.
“I don’t know,” Victor said.
“It was filthy,” Kay remembered. She looked up from the tablecloth she was sponging. “It had dirt all over it and it was greasy cold and it was Victor’s egg.” She turned to Francis. “Why did I have to eat it?”
Francis shrugged and pushed his plate back. “Don’t ask me. I had to go to work, remember. I couldn’t hang around the house all day checking up on who threw whose hard-earned food out the window.”
“Anyway,” Victor said, “payback came when I got punished for picking the gold letters off the piano—which is something you did, Kay.”
“But I didn’t,” Kay protested.
“You’re both liars,” Ida said evenly. “Thieves and liars.”
“Peasants,” Francis agreed. “Your mother and uncle,” he added, turning to Nicky, “were very bad children.”
No we weren’t, Kay thought. She carried the milk-sodden sponge back into the kitchen and rinsed it out. We were good: much better than we are now. Obedient, quiet, eager to please. I got straight A’s and came home every day to practice the piano for two and a half hours. Victor was a Boy Scout. I did all the housework. Victor mowed the lawn. And what were they doing all that time? Mother was either at dance lessons, tennis lessons, ceramic lessons, painting lessons, French lessons, meditation lessons, aqua ballet, or flower arranging; Dad was either at work or playing golf. When we came in to kiss them goodnight they’d be propped side by side in their huge bed, Dad with a murder mystery, Mom with some homework assignment, both of them with a lit cigarette in one hand and a nightcap in the other. They’d look up as if they’d never seen us before. We should have worn name tags. She remembered the friends she’d brought over who’d asked to leave in the middle of dinner; the friends Victor had over who cried for their own beds at midnight.
She poured some Scotch and drank it straight from the jigger. I don’t even get drunk anymore, she thought. She began loading the dishwasher, tried to fool Coco into eating a pearl onion, and downed a second jigger.
She returned to the dining room and sat back beside Stacy, who was cutting the last of Ida’s meat so she could eat it more easily. It was peaceful to watch; even Stacy’s hands and wrists were curvy. The candle flames flickered on the cutlery, the Scotch made another flickering flame inside her, and she could feel a smile loosen on her face and a comfortable ringing begin in her ears: oh good, she thought, a buzz, I’m getting a buzz on at last. She sat back and looked into the living room where Nicky was sitting on the floor playing with an old mah-jongg set that Ida kept on the coffee table. Behind him the piano gleamed against the black bank of windows facing the mountain. Someone had picked those gold letters off to make it read ICK instead of CHICKERING, but it had not been her; that at least was one joke she had not made. She rose to begin serving the pie and coffee when Ida’s voice stopped her.
“Big eyes,” Ida had just said to Stacy, and Kay turned, warned by the tone that Ida’s mood had changed. She glanced at Stacy, but it was too late; Ida’s hand had shot out and was gripping Stacy’s smooth arm. “Big eyes on my sapphire all night,” Ida was saying. “Well, missy, you can forget it. My ring may look better on your pretty hand but I am not dead yet. Not by a long shot so don’t even think about it.”
“I wasn’t,” said Stacy.
“Oh yes you were. I saw you.”
“Excuse me.” Stacy left the table and crouched down to play with Nicky. Kay heard their whispers and hushed, intimate laughter. We should all go home now, Kay thought. Before things get worse. But for some reason she couldn’t move. The candlelight still threw a deceptive cozy glow that held her. She looked at Ida sitting erect and righteous in her wheelchair. “You know Stacy’s not like that,” she said. Her voice felt slowed and slurred.
“I don’t care,” Ida said loudly. “I get sick of her staring. It’s her working-class background, I guess. I don’t know. Not that I’m prejudiced. I almost married a plumber. Jerry Solinsky. He went down on his knees and asked me twice.”
“Not again.” Kay turned away
“And Jerry Solinsky,” Ida continued, “came home from the war with a trunkful of medals, put himself through law school, and now he’s a senator. I could kick myself.”
“Not any more you can’t.” Francis appeared with two lit cigarettes, one of which he handed to Ida.
“If I’d married Jerry you’d certainly be different, Kay.” Ida gave her a level look behind an exhalation of smoke.
“She’d have a bigger nose,” Francis agreed.
“She’d have more than that. All Jerry’s children have made something of themselves.”
Kay knew it was no use waiting for someone to say, “But Kay has made something of herself too.” Neal was watching clips of the football game, Victor was finishing the leftovers in the kitchen, Stacy’s back was turned to all of them, and Francis had already started to wander away. Besides, she hadn’t made anything of herself. She wasn’t the concert pianist her parents had groomed her to be, nor the well-adjusted happy wife and mother she had tried to become on her own. “If you’d married Jerry I wouldn’t have been born,” Kay said. It was a child’s argument but it was the best she could do.
“You almost weren’t,” Ida said.
“What do you mean?”
“We tried to abort you,” Ida said.
“Oh dear.” Francis disappeared into the kitchen.
“Don’t try to get out of it,” Ida called after him. She looked down at her still full dinner plate. “He always runs away.”
“Why would you want to abort me?” Kay asked.
“Why do you think? We didn’t want you.”
“You didn’t know me.”
“Wouldn’t have made any difference,” Ida said. “Frankly.” She touched her lips with the hem of her bib. “This was just a delicious dinner, darling.” When Kay kept staring, she said, “Francis and I had it all arranged. We found a doctor in Oakland. Francis borrowed a car from Ansel Lipscott; we had the money from Peg Forrest—”
“Peg lent you money to abort me?”
“Oh Kay, don’t be such an ass. It was three hundred dollars. Where on earth were we supposed to find three hundred dollars?”
“But Peg,” Kay repeated. Peg Forrest had called her Buttercup, had taught her to read music, had taken her to her first symphony. “I thought Peg liked me.”
“I guess she liked me more,” Ida said.
“So,” Kay asked, “what went wrong? Why am I here?”
Ida ignored the sarcasm and only said, “The doctor. I had a slight cold and I sneezed once in his office and that was that; he refused to operate on me. These days they just haul out their chain saws and whack your legs off but in those days they had scruples. Or something.”
“So you went home?” Victor, eating salad from the bowl, looked scared; well he should be. He would have been next. Kay could feel her own eyes straining wildly from her head. She hoped Stacy wasn’t listening to this; she’d have a fit. She reached for Francis’s cigarettes lying on the lace tablecloth, pulled one toward her, reached for a candle, and lit it.
“We didn’t go straight home,” Ida said. “We went to a steakhouse down on the waterfront and drank quite a lot of whiskey as I recall. The next day your father found a job.”
“Been working ever since,” Francis said from the kitchen. He came to the doorway. “I was always against it,” he said to Kay.
“Oh you big coward,” Ida said.
Kay watched him shrug and head out toward the garage. Now he’d be gone for the rest of the night. Well, let him. She inhaled sharply, glaring down. “There’s nothing like the truth, is there?”
“No, there really isn’t.” Ida put her fork down. “I used to go to Peg and weep. ‘Why doesn’t Kay love me?’ I’d ask her. They say a fetus can hear you in the womb, you know. You probably heard every word I said.”
“Of course she did,” said Stacy. Oh-oh. Her sweet slow voice was outraged. “Fetuses can even hear what you think.” Nicky, on the floor beside her, continued building his pyramid of bone white tiles with that quiet, liquid-eyed concentration that promised at least one nightmare later tonight. Kay wanted to bend down and put her hands over his ears. That’s probably how she had looked in Ida’s womb, little monkey, hear-no-evil, humming, blocking out the voices.
“Yes. Well.” Ida dismissed Stacy and turned to Kay. “I always thought you held it against me. Did you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why were you so cold to me?”
“I wasn’t.”
“Every time I came near your crib you cried.”
“I was a baby.”
“Oh yes, but if Francis came near you, you lit right up! You cooed and got cutesy. What’s the first word you said?”
“I don’t know. How would I know?”
“‘Daddy.’ What’s the first sentence you said? ‘How was your day at the office, darling?’ Who’s the first person you crawled toward? The first person you walked to? Francis. You’ve always loved your father,” Ida said, “and you’ve never loved me. When I fed you pudding you spit it back out! But when Francis fed you: gobble, gobble, gobble. Oh! Did I tell you I lost a filling last night? Do you know what that means? Kay? Do you? That means I’ll have to go to a dentist. And do you know how I’ll get into a dentist’s chair? I’ll have to be lifted. I’ll have to be lifted like a rag doll. I am helpless. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be helpless?”
“Yes.”
“Liar! Francis? Francis, get in here. Right now!”
“Coming, dear.” Francis reappeared, pulled the wheelchair back from the table, and wheeled Ida down the hall toward their bedroom.
Kay stubbed the cigarette out. “Help.”
“There’s something called Intervention.” Victor stepped forward, looking pale. “Our pastor told us about it last week. You can call AA and they’ll come out and talk to her.”
“AA? Do you think Mom’s an alcoholic?”
Neal entered, the remote control still in his hand, and laughed. “What a question!”
But Kay and Victor looked at each other.
“I don’t know,” Victor said.
“She had three or four highballs,” Kay said, counting. “But she didn’t finish her wine. And she never drinks before lunch.”
“Of course she’s an alcoholic,” Neal said. “Both your parents are alcoholics. Ida takes drugs on top of that. And they both smoke like …” He looked sadly at the new cigarette Kay had just pulled out of the pack and at the glass of Ida’s wine she was lifting to her lips. “Hon? What are you doing?”
“I don’t know. Being their daughter?”
“It’s going to kill you.”
“No it’s not. I escaped my own abortion, remember.”
“Your own murder,” Stacy corrected.
“My mother,” Kay said, deepening her voice, “had an unsuccessful womb treatment.” She struck the match and inhaled.
“Oh babe,” said Neal.
“‘Oh babe,’” Kay mimicked as she rose to clear the rest of the table. For some reason she was madder at Neal than anyone. What gave him the right to come into her family and label everyone? His family hadn’t been so great. Francis and Ida were awful people, it was true, but they were her awful people. She slammed the dishwasher door and punched it on.
“Careful, careful,” Francis sang, padding into the kitchen in his socks. “Leave some plates for the next meal.”
“Is she still crying?”
“You know your mother. She likes to cry.” Francis poured out two brandies and handed one to Kay. She took it, puzzled. Was he going to have a companionable after-dinner drink with her, after all that had happened? He’d never done that. She gripped the stem fearfully, not sure if she was ready to accept a toast—To Your Survival, My Daughter, May You Prosper—but all Francis said was, “Here. Take this to the poor old thing. She wants to say good night to you.”
“What if I don’t want to say good night to her?”
“Just skedaddle on in there. Now.”
The snifter was overfull and Kay shielded it with her hand as she walked slowly to the bedroom, stopping once to lick her fingers. She pushed the door open with her foot and peered in. “Mom?”
At first she couldn’t see her. The bedroom was enormous and disordered. The drapes had been pulled back unevenly; the tall windows were wet, black, and reflective, doubling the tables, the lamps, the dresser. The king-sized bed with its twelve hard tasseled pillows was rumpled but empty. The television in the corner was on, turned low, and it took Kay a minute to finally see Ida beside it, sitting silently, erect on a plastic commode. She was wearing a white nylon gown with straps that had slipped down. The table beside her was crowded with medications. Her jewels sparkled in the dim light, and her eyes sparkled too, with silver shadow and tears. Her two stumps, the old one, the new one, still thickly bandaged, stuck straight out. Hacked, Kay thought. Here is a person who’s being hacked to pieces. She placed the brandy glass by Ida’s side and Ida gripped her strongly and drew her down to sit on the edge of the bed before her.
“Look at me,” Ida ordered. “I am.”
“No. Really. Look at me. What do you see?”
“You.”
“Not a monster?”
Ida held her gaze until Kay, weary, looked away. She listened to the sounds of the house: Coco’s yip, Nicky’s questioning laugh, the creak of a madrone branch outside the window. She could hear the hum of Ida’s bowels and one small plop. She willed her nostrils to close against any smell.
“You’re too human to be a monster,” she said.
“I promised myself years ago never to tell you about that abortion.”
“That’s all right.”
“It had nothing to do with you. Who you are.”
“I know that.”
“It was just that we didn’t have any money. And I had a chance to be in a play. They had offered me this part… oh it sounds so silly now … I was going to play a college girl named Rosalyn, some comedy, who knows—anyway the theater company went bankrupt before our first performance. I can’t believe I let myself hurt you.”
“I’m not hurt.”
“I have often thought what my life would have been like if that doctor had gone ahead and cut you out that day. How lost I’d be. How alone. I don’t know what I would have done without you, Kay. You have been such a gift to me. Your beauty. Your talent. Your sympathetic heart.”
Kay looked up, opened her mouth, shut it again. She was deeply, dangerously pleased. She had heard all this before and still longed to trust it. Kiss/slap, she reminded herself. Come here/go away. But if only it were true! If only she were loved, valued, honored. The wanted child of parents who adored her! Barely breathing, she dropped her eyes again.
“I’ve been having so many dreams,” Ida continued. “I don’t even know what’s real anymore. Half the things I say are from the horse anyway. But one thing you must know and that’s that I’m so very sorry. Here. I want you to have this as an apology.” Ida drew her hand from Kay’s and tugged at her sapphire ring.
“Oh no.” Kay looked at the ring with dismay. She had never liked it. As a child she had thought of it as Ida’s third eye. It was the same shape, the same color, had the same cold gleam. “I don’t want it.”
“Yes. Help me get it off.”
Reluctantly, Kay slid the ring to Ida’s first knuckle; it would go no further, and, glad, she slid it back.
“Sorry. You’re stuck with it.” She folded Ida’s hand inside her own. “But thank you for the thought.”
“I have so little to give you. You deserve so much and I give so little. All my life I’ve been so selfish. Such a bad mother!”
“Shh.” Kay put her arms around Ida and patted her shoulder. Ida’s back was surprisingly muscular, and her grip on Kay’s neck was strong. Victor opened the bedroom door and peered in, blinking. “The Pietà,” Kay said, embarrassed, as Ida clung to her. Victor, somber, nodded and closed the door again. He’s done that before, Kay realized, as she rocked Ida back and forth. He’s surprised us before, Mother and me. All those nights when Mother would careen upstairs with her accusations and apologies and collapse by my bed and Victor would come to the door, half-asleep in his pajamas, scared, holding his tennis racket for protection, and then he’d see it was just Mom, nothing unusual, and he’d go back to bed. And the next day none of us would say a word. Dad because he didn’t know about it, Mother because she wouldn’t remember, and Victor and I because we took it for granted. It was just something that happened at night—like the thermostat clicking on and off or the cat scratching at the window to come in.
“You weren’t ready to be a mother when I was born,” Kay said now. “That’s all. You were too young.”
“Yes,” Ida sniffled. “I was so young.”
“Only nineteen,” Kay teased, kissing her lightly.
Ida giggled. “For five years.” She blew her nose, her eyes fixed at a point behind Kay on the wall. Kay, curious, turned slightly and met their two reflections in the vanity mirror. Her blood chilled. Learn, she thought to herself. Learn.
“Have you been watching yourself this whole time?”
Ida didn’t answer. Then, defiant, “From this angle I look like I’m whole.”
“You are whole.”
“Yes. Well. Ha-ha. Thank you for bringing the dinner, Kay. Now please tell your father I can’t do more potty.”
“Do you want me to lift you back into bed?”
“No. Just tell him to get the hell in here. Good night, Kay.”
“Mom? Are you crying again?”
“Wouldn’t you be? If you were me?”
Kay stood up and let herself out of the bedroom. As she passed the dining room table she saw the open pack of cigarettes still lying there. She shook three out and slipped them into her purse. Francis was nowhere in sight. Neal and Nicky were gone too—they must already be in the car. Victor and Stacy were waiting for her in the living room, standing hand in hand. “I feel about a thousand years old,” Kay said. “And she’s still crying. Where’s Dad?”
“Come help me then. We’ve got to wake him. Mom’s stuck on the commode and can’t get to bed without him.”
“I’m not going to wake Dad.” Victor crossed his arms. “He wakes up swinging. Last time I woke him he gave me a black eye. Besides. The guy’s worn out.”
“I know. But we can’t just leave them.” She imagined the house after they all drove away, Ida staring at her reflection, the ash on her cigarette growing longer and longer, Francis passed out down the hall. She shivered. “Victor?”
“They’ll be fine.”
“Victor?” Kay repeated, but he and Stacy were already halfway out the front door. She walked slowly down the loud tiled hall, pausing at the wide ramp that led upstairs to Ida’s studio. Francis would not be up there, but she walked up anyway, hit the light, and looked inside. There were all Ida’s paintings, some slashed, turned to the wall, others shrouded with sheets. There was the file cabinet crammed with first drafts of short-story and novel manuscripts, and the electric typewriter frosted with dust. French and Spanish language texts jammed the bookcases and the Greek for Travelers workbook was still open on the desk. A ballet bar ran the length of one mirrored wall and the old yoga props were piled in the corner. Sewing machine, knitting basket, potter’s wheel—all still here. Maybe soon—in a month or two—Ida would be back here herself, frowning in unhappy concentration over some brand-new project. She had been talking about getting a computer, taking a correspondence course in world religions, learning to play the harp. Kay imagined her here, caught up in a hard new enthusiasm, and felt the familiar rattle of envy and irritation. She turned the light off, descended down the ramp, and followed the hall toward the guest room.
Francis lay on top of a twin bed, eyes closed, his glasses still on. His face looked pale and beaky. His hands were folded across his chest, his stocking feet were crossed at the ankle. Afraid to touch him, Kay said, loudly as she dared, “Dad?”
“Run along,” Francis said, his eyes closed.
“You sure? Mother’s still up.”
“Not at all.”
“You can get her to bed?”
“Absolutely.”
“She’s on the commode.”
“Righto.”
“Well. Okay. I’ll call Zabeth, and I’ll call you, you know, later this week, about the TB tests.”
“No problema. Look forward to it.”
She noticed his bathrobe hung over one chair, his slippers on the floor, an overflowing ashtray on the table beside him. He must sleep here often, she thought. When it’s too cold to spend the night in the Porsche.
“Dad!” she said louder. “I’m not going to leave until you get up.”
“Kay?” His voice was mild and even. Eyes closed, he groped across the table for his cigarettes, lit one, inhaled. “Why don’t you mind your own goddamned business?”
Fine. That was fine. What was her business? Two drunk parents, one stuck on the toilet, the other smoking in his sleep, but they’d made it this far without her, they could make it a little farther. She turned and walked to the door, then stopped and turned back. “This is how Mom falls,” she warned. “This is how she hurts herself. She’ll try to get herself to bed and something else will break. A rib. Her hip.”
Francis sat up and Kay took a step back. The look he gave her was small and direct, a straight shot of pure dislike. She raised her chin, said, “Well, good, you’re awake, I’ll leave then,” and, heart thudding, backed out the door.
Neal and Nicky were sitting in the warm car, listening to the radio. Nicky smiled and hugged her neck when she settled into the front seat, but Neal stared straight ahead. “Sorry,” she said, kissing and releasing both of Nicky’s hands. “But it’s hard to just leave them like that.”
“Got to leave them somehow,” Neal said. He kicked the gas and backed out the driveway with a rough twist of the wheel. He aimed down the dark hill, taking the curves with a squeal of the tires. Kay leaned her head against the seat and looked out. If he wanted to kill them that was fine with her. “You know what?” she said to Nicky.
“What.”
“We forgot to eat the peach pie.”
Nicky considered this. “Well,” he said at last. “It wasn’t really a dessert night.”