A Perfectly Good Family

“Then she got into how I didn’t seem to want her around,” said Truman. “And I didn’t, did I? How baking was one way she could be loving and stay out of my hair. So I said I didn’t want her affection in pie, damn it—”

“You said damn?”

“I said damn. She turned purple and said there was no need to curse. I said I didn’t like to eat a lot of sugar, but then she started on about Father, so …”

“You ate the pie.”

“Of course I ate the pie! I hugged her and she mopped her nose with those Kleenex used a hundred times and I dragged Averil down and we all sat around the table pretending everything was fine and the pieces she cut were enormous.”

“Don’t tell me. With ice cream. And you finished the crust.” I could see the scene clearly. My mother would bustle with napkins and pour root beer they didn’t want either and sit down to a “sliver” herself with her eyes still puffy and bright red. She’d talk about her Aids patients at the hospice with a humble, apologetic lisping that failed to disguise her sense of victory.

“It had raisins,” said Averil blackly.

“After that—did you keep getting pies?”

“Yes.” Truman sighed. “Only ever since, she acted nervous, maybe we didn’t want it and she’d offer to take it back or make an injured little joke, so we had to act exaggeratedly thankful. I think we got slightly fewer pies on average, but from then on we couldn’t scoff them upstairs but had to make a show, sharing dessert with Mother in the kitchen and agreeing about how cinnamon with blueberry was a nice touch. We may have had them less often, but the slices were gigantic and the scene was always tense. So tense you really had to wonder why she kept rolling them out.”

“Now, however,” I said, “no more coconut custard. You can eat cereal and chicken and rice and grapefruit and your diet is impeccable.”

Truman stared at his hands as if they had just wrapped around someone’s neck. His chest shuddered, and lay still. “I raked the yard. I vacuumed. I cleared pine needles from the gutters and installed new pipes in the upstairs bath. I’d do anything but sit down with her for a cup of coffee, and that was all she wanted, wasn’t it?”

“Truman—”

He looked up. “She cried, Corlis. All the time. She’d wrap her arms around me and her fingers clawed into me like—talons. She’d soak my shoulder so that I’d have to change my shirt. Those weird—shotgun—sobs … And I didn’t feel any sympathy, Corlis. I wanted to hit her.”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“Any normal son with a heart.”

“Truman, I wouldn’t even come home for Christmas.”

“I didn’t blame you!” He started to pace. “You know, I trained her—even before we got married—not to come to the dovecot.”

“As I recall, the big accomplishment was to get her to knock.”

“Right. Twenty-one years old, and she’d waltz straight into my room as if I were still in my cot.”

At another time—as I had for so many years that it ceased to make Truman angry and simply bored him—I’d have suggested that if he didn’t want his mother walking in unannounced the answer wasn’t to “train her” but to move out.

“So we had that confrontation. After which—theatrically—she’d knock. This turned out to be important, since there were some mornings I had to stuff Averil up the spiral staircase to hide on the tower deck.” He was worked up, but couldn’t help smiling.

“In winter it was freezing,” Averil recalled fondly. “The neighbors must have wondered, a naked woman on the top of your house. And Truman would scurry around hiding my clothes under the sheet and she’d come in and start to make the bed …”

I had heard these favorite stories before.

“Right, well, sanctified by marriage,” said Truman, “we got a little privacy, okay? Dinner upstairs except on Sundays, and we had our own life. After Father died that went to hell. She’d knock, three timid taps, but never waited to be invited, and crept up the stairs calling my name in that kiddie voice, Twooo-maaannn! Some days we hid. Some days we both chattered on the tower deck.

“Well, last spring she came up again and it was time for grapefruit and I wanted to slip the bourbon from under my sandbag and have our nightcap and finish talking about—”

“Mother,” I provided.

“Of course. We stood around the kitchen and gave her yes and no answers to every question and folded our arms and looked at the ceiling and wouldn’t even ask her to sit down in the living room—didn’t offer her coffee, didn’t ask her about the hospice—but does she get the message? NO! So after half an hour, right, after all those hugs and pats on the arm I couldn’t control myself. Gosh, Mother! I exploded. You can’t be mean enough!”

Truman sat down with a thud. “Well, you know how her voice was always fake? Cheery and falsetto? I’ll never forget hearing it change. It sank a full octave lower. It wasn’t nasal anymore. All the muscles in her face dropped. No, you’ve done a pretty good job, she said, and her posture became totally straight with her shoulders squared and she walked calmly down the stairs. That was her real voice. I’d never heard my own mother’s real voice before. Amazing. It was almost worth it,” Truman added. “But not quite.”

“So sometimes,” I noted, “you did hit her.”

chapter five (#ulink_029b98b0-ec26-5525-9959-2299d274362a)

I thought about Mordecai’s false dilemma,” Truman admitted as we squealed on the porch swing late the next afternoon. “I might pay $10,000 for a night with Mother and Father, as long as it were different.”

“Maybe that was his point,” I said, toeing the swing in a figure eight. “That it couldn’t have been different. Therefore, inexorably, if Mother appeared in your dovecot from beyond the grave, in five minutes you’d be fretting for her to leave you alone. That’s the way it was, so that’s the way it was.” A tautology, but I was groping.

“What do you think was wrong?”

“Mother was miserable.”

“Yes, for the last two years—”

“Long before that.”

“And Father never noticed?”

“Come on. Mother was the one who never noticed.”

I reported a remark she’d made to me when I was twelve, making my mother only forty. Rather out of nowhere, she informed me in the same buoyant, bouncy tone she’d used for reading aloud The Man with the Yellow Hat, “The best of my life is over, of course. I’d be glad to die now, except that would be selfish. I have to think of the family.”

“What she was saying,” I told Truman, “was she wished she were dead. And this from the happiest woman in the world, according to herself. She thought it a common enough sentiment and went on to propose we have Spanish noodles for dinner.”

“Don’t that beat all,” said Truman.

Like my brothers, I, too, had tried all my life to get away from my parents, the underpinning assumption that of course I couldn’t get away or I’d not have gone to such extravagant lengths as putting the entire Atlantic Ocean between us. The two deaths, one on the other, had therefore arrived with a dumb surprise. Behold, it was more than possible to flee their company; in the end they fled mine.

Truman and I had talked plenty about my parents and we weren’t through. A brother is a gift this way, since no one else would tolerate our interminable dissection for five minutes. Claustrophobically as I might yearn to chat about something else, should we stray to other matters conversation sagged and I was inevitably lured back. Talk of my parents was like candy we couldn’t resist but which made us sick.

It was as if we were trying to solve a puzzle, like the Independent crossword. Yet Andrew and I had never done anything with our filled-in crosswords but throw them away. Therefore my question was less whether my mother, feeling excluded, tried regularly to divide me from my brothers than to what conceivable use I might put this information.

I suggested we go for a walk (for Truman, that always meant the same walk); he objected that he walked after dinner and I kicked him. He grumbled and said all right he’d fetch Averil and I pleaded please don’t. “She’ll feel left out!” he objected.

“Sometimes people are left out,” I said, picturing my mother’s eyes hood and smolder while Truman and I conducted whole conversations in a language we had invented. “So there’s nothing wrong with their feeling that way.”

I grabbed a muffler and jittered on the front porch as Truman applied for permission upstairs. At last he emerged, alone but harried. One walk had cost him.

“What’s the big deal?” I asked as we tripped down the stoop. “For Christ’s sake, I’m your sister.”

“You’re not married,” he said. “Filling out course registrations can be a big deal. If Averil can get jealous of a pencil, she can certainly manage it with a whole sister.”

I swished through the curling leaves of the black walnut tree.