The winter Ray finished high school, his grandmother wrote a letter to the community college asking for him to be admitted, assuring them that he was a smart boy who had been distracted in high school by an ailing mother. Of course the community college accepted anyone, but when the admittance letter arrived his grandmother acted as if she’d won a complex appeal. “The power of reason!” she said, showing him the acceptance letter. “Now it’s time to act like somebody.” At the dining-room table, she began writing another letter, her hair tied into a long gray-streaked braid, the only way he’d ever seen her wear it.
“Thesaurus,” she said. Ray went to her room and found the leatherbound book on the dressing table beneath a rhine-stone-studded hand mirror. He set it on the dining-room table next to her and she asked, “Do you have the shoes I bought you? The inoffensive ones from Sears?”
She turned her head sideways, pen poised in the air, and waited for an answer. “Yes,” he said. “They may be too small. I haven’t worn them in a while.”
“Course not, you aristocrat.” She slid the thesaurus closer. “But you can’t start college in those. Those shoes aren’t fit for selling tires.”
He looked down at the red canvas high-tops his grandmother disliked so much. Clown shoes, she called them, the shoes of someone poor imitating someone rich imitating someone poor. His grandmother startled and fascinated him. He’d long given up trying to match her enthusiasm, content to take her side of an argument instead of asserting his own. Course the red shoes were foolish. Course he’d start college in his funeral shoes.
She used the thesaurus whenever she wrote a letter. A few weeks ago, when she began writing to the community college, she’d said the same “Thesaurus”–thing like a surgeon calling for a scalpel. When he gave it to her, she found the page she wanted, then quickly scanned it with her finger. “Bereaved,” she had said, closing the book. “That’s exactly what you are.”
He had lived at Coral Grove sporadically since he was 16, moving in for good after his mother died. It was an all-seniors condo flanked by shuffleboard courts and an asphalt lot full of handicapped parking spaces. Management made an exception for Ray because his grandmother, vigorous, impatient, 71 years old, was known around town for writing letters. Many of the letters began: “I have never been so outraged in my life.” Perhaps they feared being the subject of one of them.
His mother had died slowly of lymphoma more than a year ago. His grandmother went without Ray to see her the day she died. The first time he asked what his mother had said, his grandmother answered, “She expressed concerns regarding the family line.” The second time he asked: “She called for a hot-glue gun.” The third time: “Are you writing a book, Ray?”
Her favorite story regarding his mother was the one about her being afraid of thunder, and how she would come to sleep between her and Ray’s grandfather whenever it started to rain. His mother would stretch out her arms and legs in her sleep, and it was like sleeping–and his grandmother always saved this for last–with a swastika. She told it again and again, an automatic response when someone brought up the topic of sleep, thunder, or children. Ray figured she still told the story so much because it had nothing, really, to do with his mother.
He started community college in the spring. His classes were in the General Education building, whose name was painted in black lettering on one of the second-floor windows, abbreviated to read GENED. On the first day of astronomy, the teacher shining a flashlight on his own waxen face to demonstrate something, Ray studied his classmates’ shoes. Nearly everyone in the room, including the teacher, was wearing flip-flops. Ray wore the tasseled loafers his grandmother had bought him at Sears for his mother’s funeral. She’d waited for the salesman to leave to tell Ray his mother had died. He hated the shoes. He could barely look at them without getting angry, so he tried not to look at them.
“Think of all that potential energy!” the teacher was saying.
A few girls manipulated the flip-flops between their toes, tapping the stiff rubber soles rhythmically against their heels in stubborn unison. One girl, whom Ray recognized from the smokers’ wall in high school, had toenails the color of cough drops. When she noticed him looking at them, she curled in her toes and, like a bird taking flight, retracted her feet beneath the desk. Not for you, he imagined her thinking. Before the teacher dismissed class, he said, “Next week get ready to talk about intraplanetary pull.” Ray looked at his notes. He had written “20 billion stars?”
On the bus bench, he chewed a piece of gum next to a girl dandling a baby in her lap. “James does not like green cars,” the girl said to the baby. “James does not like white trucks. What does James like?” Ray saw that she was practicing from a language primer on the bench next to her. The baby pawed at the air and laughed. Their mutual regard, the girl’s hopeful-sounding voice as she recited her lessons, relaxed him. He reached into his backpack and offered a piece of gum to the girl, who shook her head uncertainly and said, “No thank you.” She wore what looked like a doll’s dress, with cross stitches just below her breasts, and was lankly, raggedly attractive. He offered the piece of gum to the baby, and the girl said, “I have doubts.”
On the bus home, the girl and her baby sat behind him. He kept his backpack on and sat slouched forward, elbows propped on his knees. He studied himself in the rearview mirror, his face knot-rigid, comically sour. Behind him, he could see the baby perched in the mother’s lap, waving to herself in the mirror. The mom looked to be 19 or 20, no wedding ring, no watch. In the mirror, Ray watched the baby’s hand lift slowly into the air. He felt fingers on the base of his neck, gently tapping his topmost vertebra. He turned around and the baby was leaning over the back of the bench and smiling, wide enough for Ray to see tiny hollows in the roof of her mouth where her teeth would be. “She like you,” the mother said.
Ray reached out and took the baby’s hand, which was warm and seemed to wilt slightly when he touched it, and said, “Good to meet you.”
The girl told Ray what she could about the baby, whose name was Martha, or Marta. She born in midnight. She eight months old. She eat pretty good. She sleep not so good. Ray sat sideways on his seat and browsed the baby’s face as the mother spoke, trying not to appear uncomfortable. The baby had the exaggerated features of a highly magnified insect. Eyes so black they looked irisless.
“What do you study?” the mother asked.
Astronomy, algebra, intro to writing, study skills. “Space,” he said. It was a joke of his grandmother’s, one that made sense only in response to someone asking, “What are you taking up?” which no one ever did.
“We study Ingles,” the girl said. “It’s hard, you know? We study James and his cars. James hate most of his cars.”
She and Ray looked at each other. He saw curiosity in her expression, unconcealed interest, he was sure of it. Above the curved flare of her nostril glittered a nearly imperceptible gemstone. “Your English sounds good,” he said.
But the girl was standing up to pull the stop cable, expertly holding the baby on her jutted-out hip in a way that allowed her to use both hands. With her left she straightened the dress along the inner part of her thigh where Ray’s stare had landed. “Say bye-bye now. Bye-bye.”
Ray, not realizing at first she was talking to Martha, or Marta, said bye-bye. She stopped at the front of the bus to ask the driver a question before getting off. The driver shrugged indifferently, the baby started coughing, and the girl debarked. Watching her cross the street, he felt oddly protective of her. She held up her daughter’s arm and used it to wave to him, or to the bus, from the other side of the street. He held up his hand.
A few weeks after the semester began, twice in one day his grandmother referred to what she called her expiration. In the morning she said, “Two things worry me about expiring.” But then she didn’t say what the two things were.
And, later in the afternoon: “Wait a few days after my expiration to sell my furniture for kindling.”
This came just after he returned from class and the two were sitting in lounge chairs by Coral Grove’s shuffleboard courts. A woman in a natty blue caftan pushed her disk and together Ray and his grandmother watched it glide across the green concrete into the space marked “Off.” The woman smacked the front of her thigh, displeased.
“Why are you telling me this?” Ray asked her. “Do you actually think I’d sell your furniture?”
“No. But the idea grows funnier and funnier, the way a word does when repeated too many times. Antelope. Antelope. Antelope.” His grandmother looked blithely happy in her chair. Her cloudy blue eyes were hidden behind a pair of huge prescription sunglasses that added a slight indignity to her appearance, like a plastic bag snagged on a statue. “You know the last thing your mother said, Ray, the very last thing? She told one of her doctors, ‘Go look for me outside, why don’t you.’ It was wonderfully executed.”
“That’s not what you told me last time.”
“I’ve told you a lot of nothing,” she said. Go look for me outside was his grandmother’s sense of humor, not his mother’s, who thought people falling down was funny, and little else. His grandmother was a performer. Often, in elevators, when feeling overly girdled by strangers, she would say, “Sure is crowded in here. One grenade could kill us all,” which would usually be followed by shrugging laughter from those around her.
“I’ve always been poor in the sincerity department,” she said. “But mine, I think, is an honest insincerity.”
The woman on the shuffleboard court switched sides–apparently she was playing against herself–and Ray’s grandmother began telling a story he’d heard before, the one about his mother waiting until nearly her second birthday to speak. One night she pointed to the man dancing on television and said Elvis. The stories his grandmother told were as familiar to him as the silver-gilt tea sets and etched crystal and starched tablecloths with holiday themes she kept in the dining-room hutch. The stories were a collection of high points, connected by in-distinct in-between times that lasted from punchline to punchline. The one about the police horse biting her, the one about Ray’s grandfather getting drunk at a Christmas Eve party and forgetting to put presents under the tree. She didn’t retell the story to demonstrate that his grandfather was thoughtless, or a drunk; it was just something funny he did once.
“Never waves,” she said, nodding to a patch of palmetto grass where Zimmer, another tenant at Coral Grove, was poised over his squatting dog. Zimmer was missing most of his right arm; he gripped the leash with the other. A few months ago, Ray and his grandmother had been driving slowly over the dozen or so speed bumps in Coral Grove’s parking lot. Ray saw Zimmer in the distance, walking his dog, gripping the leash as he was now, with his left arm, the other one dangling like a fat happy thumb out of his shirt sleeve. Ray’s grandmother had sped up, bypassed her parking spot, and circled around the lot. She rolled down the window and approached Zimmer from behind. “Bonjour, Mr. Zimmer.” She waved to him out of the open window.
He took a step back, clearing his dog, who seemed to mimic Zimmer’s befuddled expression, to safety. With his left hand, Zimmer choked up on the leash. Ray’s grandmother was waving fanatically now. Zimmer smirked and raised his chin to acknowledge her, and she drove on. She rolled up the window, turned to Ray, and said, “He never waves.”
Currently he approached Ray and his grandmother with his dog, a frantic white terrier who buried its nose in one of Ray’s loafers, under the chair. “Tell me, Ray,” he said. “Why don’t I ever see you with a girl? When I was your age I seem to remember my grandparents being far less interesting to me than girls.”
Ray picked up the shoes and set them on his lap. “I guess when I’m your age I’ll remember things differently then.”
“I think your grandmother’s warping you is what I think.”
“Thoughts are very important,” his grandmother said. “Thanks for stopping by.”
Zimmer huffed and he and the dog moved on. Ray’s grandmother shifted her gaze to the parking lot, the rarely used Buicks and Lincolns whose rear windshields looked mahogany beneath the shaded carport. “If I had to tell the world one single thing,” she said, “it would be, ‘Go look for me somewhere else.’ “
From the beginning to the end of her illness, his mother had had nearly two years to take him aside and share some final insight. Him sitting on the edge of her bed, holding her hand, the curtain closed. I’m sorry to have to say this. Or: What I’m about to say might not make sense to you now. Or: This isn’t going to be easy.
“Are you OK?” Ray asked his grandmother. And then, to reduce the broadness of the question–she hated broad questions–“Should we go back inside?”
“I’m fine. No, I feel remarkable right now. I feel like having breakfast for dinner.” She smiled. “You look like you want to ask me something, Ray. Ask.”
“You know what I want to ask you about.”
“The rain in London? The price of tea in China?”
She had more. The dead soldier’s canteen? The sleeves of my favorite vest?
He could tell that she had closed her eyes behind the sunglasses, something in the limpness of her smile. He wondered if she’d ever done something she didn’t absolutely feel like doing. She always seemed comfortable, so exceedingly comfortable.
In intro to writing, the teacher passed around lyrics to an Elton John song. “Poetry is mankind’s rebuttal to sadness,” he said very slowly, as if he’d just assembled the idea and needed to be careful with it while the glue dried. “Poetry,” he repeated, waiting for everyone to take out his notebook, “is mankind’s rebuttal to sadness.”
He asked them to write an elegy, which they were to read aloud in class. Ray’s was to an alligator he had watched a group of neighborhood kids lure from a lake and kill with aluminum bats. He’d started the poem as a joke, but soon found himself using up an afternoon figuring out how best to describe the alligator’s gnarled legs. He wasn’t about to eulogize his mother in front of his intro to writing class, but a dead alligator, a dead alligator was something he could pine for. Reading the poem aloud, he felt the easiness of insincerity. The rightness of meaning what you don’t mean.
Dead on its back, its legs like unwanted souvenirs . . .
His teachers were fantastically serious. In astronomy, the teacher asked questions like, “Now, what would happen if you accidentally steered your spacecraft into a black hole?” It was Ray’s last class of the day, and the one that interested him least. “You’d totally die,” was the correct answer, offered by one of the flip-flopping girls. Ray let the words fly past. Spacecrafts, black holes: certain things he had come to think of as impenetrable, pleasantly mystifying, and space was one of these things.
The girl in astronomy whom Ray remembered from high school asked one day after class, “Didn’t your mom die or something?” She waited until he said yes to tighten her expression. “Sad,” she said, as if to clarify the face she was making. When Ray got home, he looked through his yearbook and found the girl’s picture in the “Superlatives” section. Most School-Spirited.
One night, the class met on the roof of the GENED building and together watched the instructor aim his flashlight at the evening sky. The flashlight made for an ineffective spotlight; its beam disappeared a few yards above the building. “Cetus, Aries, Triangulum, Andromeda,” he said. Then, extending his arm farther: “There, streaking meteors. There, do you see them? Right . . . there?”
Ray saw a sky the raw annulling color of deep water. It was full of distant holes of light traced by an airplane with its red beacon signal blinking. All of it so perfectly futile and lonesome–he shivered with self-pity. Away from Coral Grove, freed from his usual orbit, he wanted to remember this feeling. The sky offered nothing, and Ray offered nothing back. His mother was gone. He was alone, alone, alone. He sort of felt like howling.
Nobody else saw the meteors, so the teacher continued his incantation: Pegasus, Lacerta, Cepheus . . .
The wind picked up and Ray lowered his head. Most of his classmates were shivering where they stood, hugging themselves. One by one they began to go back downstairs, leaving the teacher and his flashlight, its feeble beam fanning out from his arm like a sneeze.
After class, Ray jogged to the bus stop, his loafers digging into his heels with each step. Out of breath, he approached the bench and saw, sitting on the far side, eyes closed, arms crossed, like something carved atop a sarcophagus, the girl with the baby. Tonight, though, she was without the baby. She wore a white jacket of puffedout squares, zipped up to the neck. When Ray sat down she coughed and scooted over even farther. He waited for her to open her eyes, waited. Her hands were shaking. After a few minutes, he said, “How’s your daughter?”
She jolted awake and looked over, clearly not remembering him, then shook her head. Her hair looked longer, curled out hopeful along her neck. “Deceased,” she said.
The word came out assured and without accent. Ray waited for her to explain, then, thinking she must not have understood the question, repeated it.
“Something happen,” she said. “Something slip in her lung and now she deceased.”
The girl looked down at her knees, folded her hands, and shrugged her shoulders several times. After a few minutes Ray, trying to come up with something to say, realized she was crying. He moved closer and laid his hand on the shoulder of her jacket until the bus approached. Its headlights bounced and flared and made the night seem colder and darker. They sat down next to each other on one of the side-facing front seats. “Did you say Martha, or Marta, the last time I saw you?” he asked.
“I misunderstand.”
“Your daughter. What was your daughter’s name?” It seemed important that he know.
“Marta. She deceased two days. And now I misunderstand everything. The flowers man ask if I want rice at the funeral. The other man I think he say we should bury Marta in her diaper. I don’t know what.”
Her face tightened and she looked down and began shrugging her shoulders again, a dejected though modest movement. Ray found himself trying to remember what he could about the daughter, her warm, wilting hand, her dark eyes. As the bus rumbled past the girl’s stop, she explained that she was headed to Sears to buy something for Marta to be buried in; she didn’t know what children were supposed to be buried in.
“She too small to be deceased,” the girl said. More shrugging, the jacket swishing against itself. Ray kept his hands in his lap.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“She not even sure what happen. She too small.”
“I remember.”
A few weeks ago had he thought she was attracted to him? Had he imagined that when they met again he would ask her name and if she wanted to go see a movie? The idea seemed sort of vulgar now. The girl repeated, “She deceased two days.”
He offered to go with her to buy the dress. Perhaps he expected her not to understand him, but she did, and her face brightened. He let his stop pass, feeling oddly watched and judged until his grandmother’s condo was out of view. He noticed the mother had removed the gemstone from her nose; in its place was a tiny, tight puncture mark. Her name, she said, was Risa.
Sears was inside the older of the two malls in town, the mall preferred by panhandlers, graffiti artists and Ray’s grandmother. He hadn’t been there since they went shopping for loafers more than a year ago. The inside smelled unequivocally like scorched hair. Most of the stores had shut down, replaced by little specialty kiosks in the center walkways. He and Risa walked past booths selling hermit crabs with brightly painted shells, cat calendars, personalized umbrellas, chair massagers, raffle tickets for skateboards and pinatas. In front of Sears, she handed him $35 and said she wanted to wait outside.
Halfway into the lawn-care section, he was approached by a saleswoman who said, “Cash money, cash money!” He was still holding the $35 in his hand.
He turned around, walked out of the store, and found Risa sitting on the edge of a planter, beneath fake ferns that appeared to be browning. Her eyes were closed again and she looked forgone, defused. “Risa,” he said. She opened her eyes slowly. “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to buy. A dress?”
“Yes, right. A fancy.” She held her arms out by her waist to indicate the desired puffiness of the dress.
“What size was Marta?”
“Nine months.”
“No, size,” he said. “How big was she?”
“Nine months.”
She waited for the next question, her expression starting to go a little chaotic. Ray decided he’d figure out sizes in the store.
Finding a fancy dress was not difficult. The baby dresses were all frills and silk and velour, worn throughout the girl’s section by doll-size mannequins in frisky poses. “Baby’s First Tea Party,” one of them said. He felt obvious and corrupt, like a burglar shopping for ski masks. He grabbed the first shiny dress he saw, turquoise-colored with white ruffles, on sale for $29.99. It seemed close to Marta’s size. He hurried up and paid, not looking at the dress too carefully, trying to focus only on the transaction. Did he want the receipt in the bag? the cashier asked. An excellent question. Yes, yes he did.
“Um, I have doubts,” Risa said after pulling the dress out of the bag, unable to conceal her disappointment. “Maybe some more big and warm, you know? With long sleeve?”
Ray waited, hoping she would notice his reluctance and change her mind. “Green maybe,” she decided.
He walked back into the store with the bag and exchanged the dress for a new one, which was, according to Risa, too “itch-feeling.” The next one was too cheap-looking, and the one after that was no green, no green at all. Each time into the store he noticed details he’d managed to avoid the time before. The mother standing behind a toddler who gripped the edge of a grill to steady himself. The family looking politely miser-able in the lobby of the portrait studio. The little boy asking his dad to buy him the T-shirt with the spiders on it.
By the fifth dress, he was annoyed with Risa, her clumsy English, the way she opened the bag and pulled out each dress, all greedy and doubtful. He tried to suppress the irritation–he had wanted to do the job solemnly for her, without complication–but she seemed to be punishing him. She had a long jawline and, through no fault of Ray’s, was starting to resemble a coyote. “Are you sure you don’t want to do this yourself?” he asked her. She was sure.
This time, when he brought the dress to the register, the cashier studied him suspiciously and said, “You need to go see customer service.”
Take a left at intimates, the cashier said, it’s just across from footwear.
The only thing that stopped him from going home right then and leaving Risa was the $35, a sum of money that, as he walked past racks of plus-size bras and camisoles, seemed tragic. Not quite 25 and not quite 50. He knew he could forgive himself for not buying the dress she wanted; leaving with her $35, he decided, he couldn’t.
He waited in line behind a woman with long, purplish-gold hair extensions, who kept repeating, “How we gonna make this right?” to an attendant standing behind a window. Ray’s feet hurt from walking so much. He had his back to the shoe section, but he knew that probably very nearby was a display with his loafers perched atop it.
The customer service attendant listened sympathetically to Ray’s story and, when he was done, said to return the dresses as often as necessary. The man had a round, heedful face, perfectly suited behind glass. “I hope this is the last time,” Ray told him.
Risa’s head was down and she was crying again when Ray came out of the store. Below her legs, just above the base of the planter, someone, Travis perhaps, had spraypainted Travis Owns the Vagina.
“The world go on,” she said when he sat down. “I see a baby look like Marta a lot. But Marta always stay how she is, you know? And all her clothes.” Tears squirmed in the clumped mascara between her eyelashes. “I can’t explain. I’m sad.”
Ray handed her the bag and waited for her to open it. She set it down by her feet. “I buy a pretzel for you. Thank you.”
She produced two pretzels, which she had enfolded in a series of napkins to keep warm. She handed him one, all swaddled in its wrapping. Seeing the care she had dispensed on it, he hesitated to eat it. It was encrusted with hot cinnamon sugar. After a few bites, he decided it was the best thing he’d ever tasted. “My mom died,” he said when he was finished. It sounded a little more gleeful than he intended, like bragging. Risa looked prepared to start crying again. “Over a year ago,” he said.
“What is she like?”
He described a time at the health-food store. He was bothering his mother to buy chewable vitamins or something, and she turned and, pretending not to recognize him, said, “And whose little boy are you?” This was a long time ago, when she was trying to lose weight with the Grapefruit 45 plan. Their shopping cart was filled with powder packets and mesh bags of citrus fruit, and she continued to repeat whose little boy are you as he followed her down the aisle.
At the time, he was more upset about being called a little boy than at the refusal to acknowledge him. For some reason the memory was now stuck to her, sharp if not sweet, memorable if not significant. He liked remembering it. Every so often he’d be reminded of it, and the act of retrieval polished it to glistening again, for the next time. Describing it to Risa, he heard himself building to a punchline that never came.
“That’s nice,” she said, though Ray wasn’t sure how much of it she understood. “I wish I could have more. Last night I try to count the baths she took.”
The lights overhead dimmed and brightened, dimmed and brightened, signaling that the mall was about to close. “How many?” he asked.
“Twenty-nine,” she said.
On the bus ride home, she held the Sears bag in her lap. She still hadn’t opened it. Ray tried to recall what the dress looked like, and couldn’t. The bus stopped every few blocks to pick people up; everybody seemed to be traveling with babies, but Risa appeared not to notice. “How is space?” she asked. She pronounced it espace.
The question surprised Ray, who said what he’d been thinking earlier on the roof: “Too big.” A baby began crying nearby, an awful threshing cry, louder than the bus’ loud heater. Risa peered around to see where it was coming from. And then, she pulled the cable at a different stop than the one at which she’d gotten off before, and thanked him again, kissing his cheek. An unreluctant kiss, startling and very agreeable. Her lips felt gummy, and Ray knew he’d never see her again. She hugged the Sears bag against her white jacket. “This,” she said, “means to me I can’t say how much, you know?”
Looking at the empty seat where she had been, at the peach-shaped mark on the seatpad, Ray realized what she’d been referring to. Space. It was what he took up. He lay his forehead against the bus’ window and let the vent blow into his eyes.
His mother, the last time he saw her, was almost unrecognizable, near bald, skinny, with dim green veins beneath her skin. The veins branched off and reconvened all over her neck and face, even on her closed eyelids, and were exhausting to look at. Get-well cards sat open on one of the end tables, as well as a lone hardy jade plant that had outlasted all the floral arrangements. Machines monitoring her vital signs made doomed-sounding beeps, which didn’t seem to alarm the nurses when they checked them. Ray sat near the door reading a celebrity-gossip magazine while his grandmother played solitaire on the other end table. She asked his mother, who was sleeping, if she remembered coming to bed with her when it started thundering. “You’d slide into bed between Poppy and me, and then out came the elbows.”
Beep bip beep bip: Two monitors were ticking at different speeds. Every minute or so the ticks would meet twice, then separate. His mother had become hypersensitive to contact and had stopped letting Ray and his grandmother touch her. The smell of her own teeth, she said, made her nauseous. Just thinking about sand in her pantyhose was enough to make her gag.
“Like a swastika,” his grandmother said, in such a way that Ray knew she was addressing him too. He looked up from the magazine. For weeks he’d been hoping his mother would make an announcement to him, something to mark her by. She continued to breathe damply. The machines continued monitoring.
“Time to go home,” his mother said, then seemed to wake up. “I’m tired of being beheld.”
“You don’t mean that,” his grandmother said.
“That’s enough for today,” she said. “It’s selfish to bring him here every afternoon.”
Ray had closed his eyes a while ago, but wasn’t sleeping. If he opened them, his mother would look over and offer a pained smile, he knew it.
“I’d love it if people came and watched me for a few hours a day,” his grandmother said. “I’d put on a show.”
“I mean it, Mom. Take him someplace else. He has enough cancer memories.”
“Foolishness. We’ll let you rest. I’m sure you’ll feel better in the morning.”
This was the last time his grandmother brought him. A few days later they went to Sears. He knew she was buying the shoes for the inevitable funeral. As the salesman brought boxes of identical-looking loafers in and out of the store-room, which were vetoed by either Ray or his grandmother, Ray tried to convince her that buying the shoes before his mother died was unfair, but that wasn’t right. Unlucky? He didn’t know the right word. His grandmother liked a pair of loafers with ludicrous jaunty tassels. “No one in those shoes needs to worry about a thing,” she said.
“They look like golf shoes,” he said.
Impatient, he agreed on the loafers and the salesman went to ring them up. Ray continued to protest. What if his mother found out what they had been doing? How would that make her feel? It seemed so . . . disrespectful. That was the word.
She waited for the salesman to reach the cash register, then turned to Ray and said, “She died, Ray. Yesterday, while you were in school.”
She nodded to show him she wasn’t joking, the gray braid sluggish along her shirt collar. He hated that she waited until they were in Sears to tell him. His mother had been sick for some time. But Sears? At the register, the salesman held up the shoebox and shouted, “You wearing these out the store?”
“Are you serious?” his grandmother said. “I mean, imagine!”
At some point during the short walk from the bus stop to Coral Grove, which at night was lit from below like a monument by yellow floodlights, Ray decided to confront her. He was tired of pretending not to care about what his mother had said. He wanted his grandmother to tell him, no jokes, no stock phrases.
He found his grandmother in her bedroom. She lay in pajamas with her feet against the headboard, holding a paperback about a foot from her head, which rested flat on a quilt bedspread. She was wearing the prescription sunglasses. “Then Downtown Billy broke his leg, ending our father’s dream of winning the Kentucky Derby,” she read. “Trash, I spend my days deciphering trash.” She put the book down and turned around to sit on the edge of the bed. “And I seem to have lost my eyeglasses.” She took off the sunglasses and massaged her temples. The skin around her eyes strained and slackened.
“Judgment’s stepson,” she said. “I think I’ll have some coffee before listening to what you surely have to say.”
She went to the kitchen and turned on the faucet: Ray could hear the water pipes groaning between the walls. Her bedroom, without her in it, felt tiny. He wished he knew where Risa was going with the dress. She too small to be deceased, she had said. That word, said with such certainty, would never mean anything but the absence of Marta. A year from now, 10 years.
“Change of venue,” his grandmother hollered from the other room. He went into the dining room, where she was sitting in front of the hutch. She stirred a packet of instant coffee into a mug, looking intently at her hands. “I’ve been meaning to write a letter to Folgers. An appreciative letter.”
“What did she say?” he asked. It came out lank and whiny. “No jokes. What did Mom tell you? I don’t want to hear–“
“I know, Ray.” She sipped from her coffee, then looked into the mug suspiciously. “You’re trying to catch me off-guard.”
“Just tell the truth.” Her blue eyes scanned back and forth in their murk. Then she closed them and sighed. “In my thesaurus there’s a note. Bring it to me.”
The thesaurus was on the dressing table. He pulled out a green piece of paper with the familiar Mayo Clinic logo. We Care and It Shows was written beneath in soft script. The slogan was probably intended to soothe, but it had the reverse effect on him. Walking around the hospital while his mother was staying there, he would see the slogan everywhere, even on the cafeteria salad bar’s plastic sneeze guard. The more he saw it, the more he doubted it. Not the fact that they cared, or that it showed, but that it would make a difference.
The note, in his grandmother’s handwriting, said: I certainly wonder where I’m off to.
“The day before your mother died,” she said, when he handed her the note. “She wanted me to write that down. I did, and there it is.” She handed it back to him.
At first he thought she was play-acting, but there was no spark in her expression. He read it again. In his grandmother’s tight, angrily neat cursive it looked like scolding. He asked what his mother meant to say.
“Just that, I suppose. Maybe more. Definitely not less. I intended to add something to it, something remarkable, but I couldn’t come up with anything. Then I thought about writing I hope there are refreshments, but–” she paused to take a sip of coffee–“I didn’t.”
He stared at the note, then looked at her, huddled over her mug, wrapped in a lilac houserobe. “You shouldn’t have hidden this away like it was yours.”
She didn’t disagree. Nor did she wave him off with a rebuttal. Her mouth was half-open, as if caught on a word. He stood next to the hutch, a punch away from all that etched crystal.
“It’s a shabby message,” she said. “The longer I waited to tell you about it, the shabbier it got. Of all the remarkable things she could have said.”
“She said this.”
“She could have said, ‘No more buttoning and unbuttoning. I am happy now.’ Or, ‘Let us cross the river, Ray, and rest under the shade of the trees.’ ” He wasn’t smiling. “You’re right, I shouldn’t have kept it.”
“What does it mean?” His voice was squealing again, a little.
“A lot of nothing,” she said. She watched him intently now. “She was sick, Ray. I’m sure she didn’t know what she was saying. I bet it made absolute sense to her.”
“You hid it in your thesaurus.”
“I miss her, too,” his grandmother said. “She was my good friend. I knew her all her life.”
He sat down in a chair across the table from his grandmother, and took off his shoes. His feet had begun to hurt again. “You know what?” he said, setting the shoes on top of the table. “I hate these shoes. I’m throwing them away.”
“They’re still fine shoes. At least give them to Goodwill.”
“No one should be subjected to these shoes.”
His grandmother, maybe sensing some levity, smiled and said, “Guess what we’re having for dinner,” but Ray wouldn’t guess. Instead he stood up to go to his room, stopping first at the kitchen trash to throw away the shoes. His grandmother extended her hand when he passed, and he pumped it awkwardly, feeling her warm palm. “Just guess,” she said. Her expression was agile, teasing. A burst blood vessel ran like a shrimp’s mud vein down the length of her nose. Ray let go of her hand and went to his room.
What’s for dinner, he would have asked her. Sleep, she would have answered.
He looked around his bedroom for a folder to put the note in. He wanted to save it for later, much later. He searched the drawers of his grandmother’s old sewing machine, which he was supposed to be using as a desk. In one of them, beneath tangled spools and bobbins, he found a large photo of him and his mother. It was a posed portrait taken at the insistence of his grandmother a few weeks after his mother started chemotherapy. His grandmother had been asking them for years to have a formal photograph taken, preferably with an autumn theme. One afternoon, she drove them to the mall (“Ray needs school clothes”), brought them to the portrait studio, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Standing in front of a gold-and-russet backdrop, elbows on a fence post, his mother looked like a disgruntled scarecrow. Ray sat next to her, besieged by cowlicks, breakfast stains on the front of his shirt. Both of them frozen together by his grandmother in the wrong moment.
When his mother died, Ray thought the desolate feeling was at its worst, and its mildness surprised him. He had planned to cry, and he did, and to hurt for a while, and he did, and then to feel better. He figured her absence was a big hole that needed filling. But months passed and he missed her more, not less. Whenever some errant powder smell reminded him of her, he would realize that while her absence made the hole, her absence was also what came later to fill it.
At the sewing machine, he held on to the note and returned the picture to the drawer. He looked around his room for somewhere to put it. He went to his bed and decided to set it on top of the end table, against a porcelain lamp. He wanted the note to be there first thing when he woke up: the punchline, shouting its absence. He wanted to hear it.
———-
Kevin Moffett writes a monthly column about zoos and amusement parks for Funworld magazine. His stories and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s, Tin House, The Guardian, and The Believer. He lives with his wife and young son in Iowa City.
