Elsewhere: A Memoir Part 6

When rational, she knew returning to Gloversville was a pipe dream, but desperation had a way of transforming every image projected in the theater of her mind, neither vague nor cloudy, as you might expect, but in brilliant high definition. Maine was all muted sepia tones, whereas Helwig Street-and Sixth Avenue, where her sister lived-seemed close enough to touch, everything painted in bright primary colors. Just as vivid in her imagination was the self she would become once she returned home. In Gloversville, she wouldn't be pushing eighty. She'd be the age she was during her last stint, when my grandmother was still alive. To be sure, she hadn't been in the best of health even then, but she'd managed well enough and would again.

She'd only been in that first Farmingdale apartment a few months before she floated the idea of moving home again. It was a Sat.u.r.day afternoon, after we'd done the grocery shopping, and we were watching a ball game before I headed back to Waterville. She'd been out of sorts the whole time.

"We might as well face facts," she finally said. "I hate Maine. I never should've come here." I had to smile, given how she made it sound like she'd done it all on her own. "It was a mistake. I should've gone straight to Gloversville from Illinois. I don't know what I was thinking."

"Okay," I said, "but while we're facing facts, here's another. You also hate Gloversville. You have your whole life. The last time you went back there, it was-in your own words-a terrible mistake."

There were few things my mother liked less than having such statements thrown back at her, so this put her into a dark funk. "It's true I've always hated Gloversville," she conceded half an hour later when the game ended and I rose to leave, "but things there have changed."

Which was true. They'd become even more problematic. In the past she'd always had the Helwig Street house, but that had been sold, in part to pay for the long-term care my grandmother required toward the end of her life. What my mother was referring to, however, was that my aunt and uncle had swapped houses with my cousin Greg and his wife, Carole, who had two kids and needed the extra room. Phyllis and Mick now occupied the downstairs flat of the house next door. My mother's idea, it finally came out, was for them to evict their upstairs renters so she could move in. "I'd have some kind of life there, at least," she concluded. "Aren't I ent.i.tled to that much?"

"Are you forgetting you can't do stairs anymore?" I couldn't help pointing out. After all, this consideration had governed every apartment search we'd made since Illinois. Indeed, when she visited our house these days, all activities had to take place on the ground floor because the pitch of the stairs up to the girls' bedroom was too steep. "I could there," she said, her stony expression daring contradiction. "You forget. I always lived on the second floor in Gloversville."

In fact, she went on, nothing was really wrong except Maine. Once back in Gloversville she'd not only feel better, she'd be better. Why? Because there she'd at least be a person. Her family would be close by, along with other people who'd known her all her life, who knew she was a human being, who believed not only in her but also in her resilience and her ability to accomplish things. In Maine, none of the above.

I didn't see any point in debating whether she'd be more of a person in Gloversville than Camden, so I moved on to other problematic specifics, though I was pretty sure this tactic would prove equally futile. "How would you do your groceries? How would you get to the doctor or the hairdresser?"

"Greg would take me."

"Greg's juggling three jobs, and Carole works all week at the bank."

"Then I'd go with Mick and Phyl."

"Except you like to hold to your own schedule. Remember how you always complained, when you and Grandma lived together, that every week there'd be a different grocery day? They'd call and tell you to be ready in five minutes, and forty-five minutes later you'd still be waiting? How would that be different now? Have they changed? Have you?"

Her mouth had formed a thin line. "I'd walk to the store if I had to."

"In winter?"

Yes, she insisted, even in winter. Furthermore, if I was worried about money, there was no need. She'd get a job.

Of course I knew these wild a.s.sertions were trial balloons whose credibility she had to test by letting them float away, and that despite the brazenness of this last balloon-that she'd get a job-even she knew it would never gain alt.i.tude, no matter how much heated conviction she pumped into it.

"Mom," I said, "I'm not trying to make you feel bad, but we can't make real-world decisions based on magical thinking."

She was silent for a while, her face a dark thundercloud. "If only you wouldn't disagree with every single thing I say," she told me. "You take such pleasure in shooting down any idea I ever have. Why can't you be on my side for once?"

"What exactly would you like me to agree with?"

She thought for a moment. "That Greg would take me shopping. He's my nephew and he loves me."

"Yes, he would, and of course he does. That's why it would be so wrong to ask him to. He has too many other responsibilities and too few resources. The last thing he needs is another burden."

Now she threw me a triumphant look, as if this was the concession she'd wanted from the start. "That's all I am, then? A burden? Is that what you're saying?"

"No, I'm saying that getting you to the hairdresser is my responsibility, not Greg's."

"Fine," she said. "Then I guess I'll just have to stay here in my cage."

The next day she called to apologize. After I left, she'd given herself a good talking-to. Her problem, she'd concluded, was always the same. She wanted to be independent, no one's burden or responsibility, not even mine. I had a career and a wife and two daughters to raise, and she hated that on top of all that I also had to think about her. She didn't know why her thoughts always returned to Gloversville, as if it were Brigadoon. She knew better. In the future, I was to simply ignore her when she "got like that."

The trouble, as she knew full well, was that when she got like that there was no ignoring her. Since then we'd been through the same bitter, futile exercise twice more, the volume turned up a notch or two each time. Now, on the eve of our move to the coast, we were back in familiar territory yet again, the only difference being that this time her fury was exaggerated by further changes in the Gloversville landscape. Earlier that year my uncle Mick had died after a long, terrible illness, leaving my aunt hollowed out by grief and by the guilty relief that comes when a loved one's suffering finally ends. She and my mother had begun talking on the phone more regularly, usually once a week, usually reminiscing about their girlhoods on West Fulton Street, one of Gloversville's many immigrant neighborhoods. I think they both enjoyed these strolls down memory lane, and their nostalgia for simpler times made it easy to paper over their many ideological and temperamental differences. Lately, though, according to my aunt, with whom I also spoke regularly, my mother's mood had grown darker, as if she no longer had access even to the pleasures of the past, and the last time Phyllis asked her how things were going in the present, she said that there wasn't much point in talking about it, that she had no life, and there was no reason to pretend she did. Hearing this, my aunt called to warn me that another storm was approaching.

I, of course, needed no such warning. I'd seeded the clouds myself by ignoring my wife's or and sticking that FOR SALE sign in the yard in front of our Waterville house. Still, when the storm finally broke, even I was stunned by its ferocity. This time instead of telling me what she wanted to do, she was announcing what she intended to do, with or without my help. Having already been through the whole Gloversville scenario, she knew all my objections by heart and had no intention of listening to them again. She wasn't a child who needed to be told what she could and couldn't do. She was going, and that's all there was to it. There was nothing I could do to prevent it. If I didn't want to pay the movers, she'd leave every single thing she owned behind. If I wouldn't drive her there, she'd take a bus. If I wouldn't drive her to the bus, she'd take a taxi. Gloversville was where she belonged. She was going.

"Okay," I said, "but where specifically?" I knew, of course. My uncle's death meant that my aunt was now living alone in the two-bedroom downstairs flat, and it was that second bedroom my mother had in mind.

"Where do you think? With my sister."

The last thing I wanted was to ask the obvious question, but there was no avoiding it. "She's invited you?" I said.

This question was so cruel because I already knew the answer. My aunt had told me more than once that she was unsure whether she'd be staying in Gloversville much longer. Both of her daughters had asked her to come live with them, and she thought she might. I wondered now if she'd maybe mentioned this possibility to my mother, if perhaps that was what had precipitated the current meltdown. Because if Phyllis meant to move away, then my mother's final refuge, her last desperate hope for the independent life that existed nowhere except in her imagination, was disappearing before her eyes.

"What do you mean, has she invited me?" she demanded to know. "What are you saying?" But before I could explain that I wasn't saying anything, merely asking something, she continued, her voice now shaking with rage. "Are you actually implying that my sister would refuse to take me in?"

I took a deep breath and lowered my voice, hoping to balance her frenzy with calm and reason, though in truth I'd never known this strategy (or any other, for that matter) to work when she came totally unglued. "I'm saying your sister recently lost her husband. I'm saying she's raw with grief and unsure in her own mind what comes next."

"You know," my mother said, "it's all finally coming clear."

"What's that?"

"What you think of me. What you've always thought of me."

"Mom-"

"Did it ever occur to you," she wanted to know, "that maybe I could help my grieving sister? That there might be somebody in the world who actually likes me? As a person? Who might enjoy my company? That instead of being a burden-like I am to you-I might actually make someone's life better?"

"Mom-"

"Why don't you come right out and say it. You think I'm incapable of happiness. That I'm incapable of making anyone else happy."

To my surprise, I heard myself say, with a sinking heart, "All right, Mom. You win. Call Aunt Phyl. If Gloversville's what you want, I won't stand in your way."

The immediate and profound silence on the other end of the line suggested that I wasn't the only one surprised by this. She'd been prepared for several more rounds of verbal bludgeoning, but now she had to improvise. "As you say," I told her, "you're not a child."

After hanging up, I called my aunt and gave her the short version of what had just transpired. "Oh, poor Jean," she said.

"Yes," I said, immediately choked up that she could so perfectly sum up her sister's plight in three small words, and suddenly I felt both the weight and truth of the bitter questions my mother had just hurled at me. Had I considered even for an instant that she might be able to help her sister in her grief and loss? Had it occurred to me that my aunt might actually enjoy her company? That there actually might be someone, somewhere, who wouldn't see her as a burden? That there might be a place for her, a life? Because the honest answer to all those questions was a resounding no. No, nothing like that had crossed my mind. Worse, the real reason I was now calling my aunt was to apologize for the fact that my mother, who'd more than once accused me of trying to keep her in a cage, had broken out. Now Phyllis, whom I wanted to spare, was going to have a difficult morning.

"She keeps saying she wants to be with her family," I explained, "with people who love her."

"But you are her family," my aunt said. "You and Barbara and the girls."

"I know."

"It would cost you thousands to get her here, and two months later you'd have to bring her back again."

"I know," I repeated weakly.