By their adolescences, Elaine and Minnie looked so different that strangers in lines at the grocery store or doctors’ offices laughed out loud when they found out they were siblings. At that point, it was like the sisters had been born in different dimensions, like Grandma Bea had, during labor, wandered out of her hospital room into a space-time warp where she delivered two children from varying proportional systems, who would look almost identical for the first few years of life, until one shrank and the other expanded, not in terms of weight, but of something more elemental. Aunt Minn appears more sleek and efficient than my mother: smaller eyes, bones, gestures, words, more porcelain in style, and delicacy of movement. My mother, woman of enthusiasms, has that roiling bountiful hair, generous features and gestures, and when well an appreciation of jazz piano and vibrators, full moons, gold-plated oyster forks. The man she is currently dating, Edward, the pianist, says when they make a plan to go out, “the lights of the city brighten.” His own eyes glow as he grabs her hand, as we leave her room at Hawthorne House to walk over together to the living room area, where she will soon be singing as part of the post-lunch show. I’m here for my annual fall visit, a few months into the memory tent, the visit timed to coincide with this performance of selections from Pal Joey as accompanied by Edward and his friend the percussionist, and we stroll the main hall together and step into the living room, and when we do, to my complete shock, the whole area, my usual favorite part of the visit, the place in which I have spent so many updating afternoons, reveals itself to be entirely redecorated. Chrome-armed sofas and new plastic coffee tables. Solid-color rugs. Enlarged photographs of birds and flowers. Particleboard desks. Wicker trash cans. My mother sees my face, tells me someone discovered a month or so ago that those beautiful raw silk lime green parlor chairs in which we sat, side by side, over so many years, had all been absolutely seething with termites. “You wouldn’t believe how fast they fixed it!” she says, laughing. “It took two days? Was it two, Edward?” “It seemed like a minute,” he says, smiling into her eyes. They head to their spots, her greeting everyone like the star of a show, which she is, him settling at the piano, which is the same, and before I take my seat, and the show begins, I stop and ask a staff member in the hall if she happens to know where the seascapes that used to hang on the walls in those golden frames went: the ones with the crashing waves? The wild storm-clouded skies? The pail? Maybe there’s one in a closet somewhere I could take home? I’d found, I tell her, so much solace in them over the years. My voice surprises me, shaking with urgency, and the tall woman in scrubs hears it, nods at me—we’ve had many short conversations over the years—and pulls me aside, away from the remaining trickle of residents heading in to get their seats. In the corner, she tells me in a hushed, almost conspiratorial voice that she’s very sorry, and she loved those pictures too, but by the time they dragged the furniture and paintings outside to get picked up by sanitation services, everything was literally disintegrating in their hands. “It was actually kind of incredible,” she says, widening her eyes. “Watching them dissolve. It was almost like they had never existed in the first place.” She flutters her fingers in the air. “Like they returned to dust.”
My mother sings wonderfully, and gets a standing ovation from the residents, and Edward hugs her in a way that seems kind, and she introduces me to everyone as her greatest accomplishment, but I think only about the disintegrating paintings during the flight home. They are significant to me in a way I can’t quite pinpoint. It’s evening by then, and the sun is setting, and the dust motes floating in the body of the plane are lit into a goldenness. Outside the windows, the landscape moves below us, farmlands again, mountain peaks, my own thinking, and by the time the wheels bump to landing, I think it might be because it means that any speck of dust in the world may have once been part of a beautiful painting. My mother looked happy in her bronze eye shadow, happier than I’ve ever seen her. My baggage is the last to arrive on the baggage claim.