Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [66]
“When will I be up?” she asked at first.
“Soon, soon,” we told her.
I felt that we were cowardly, but Saul said we should protect her as long as possible. We had some arguments about it. (This dying business was pointing up all our differences.) Then one day she asked me, “Please. When exactly will I start getting better?”
It was Sunday, a bright white Sunday in December, and Saul was not around. My only witness was Amos, stapling music sheets over in the armchair. I took a deep breath. I said, “Mama, I don’t believe you’ll ever be getting better.”
My mother lost interest and turned away. She started smoothing the tufts on her quilt. “I hope you’re remembering to mist my ferns,” she said.
“Yes, Mama.”
“I dreamed the tips were browning.”
“They’re not.”
“Dr. Porter is a very fine person but I hated that surgeon man,” she said. “Dr.… Lewis? Loomis? I knew right away he wasn’t worth much. Coming in ahead of time to get on my good side, cracking jokes, keeping his hands in his pockets—and plotting all along to rummage about in my innards. I think we ought to sue him, Charlotte.”
“Mama, we can’t do that.”
“Certainly we can. I want my lawyer.”
“You don’t have a lawyer,” I told her.
“Oh,” she said. “Well. In that case.”
She slumped a little. I thought the conversation had tired her. I stood up and said, “Why don’t you try and sleep now, I’ll go see about supper. Amos is here if you need something.”
“I need to know the name of my problem,” she said.
For a minute I didn’t understand. Her problem? How would I know? I was still trying to figure out the name of my problem. But then she said, “My illness, Charlotte.”
“It’s cancer,” I said.
She folded her hands on the quilt and grew still. I became aware of Amos; he had lowered his music sheets and was staring at me. His shucked-off moccasins lay gaping beneath his chair. I saw he had a hole in his sock that I would have to fix. Every thought seemed to come to me so clearly. “Don’t wear that sock again until I’ve darned it,” I said. I left.
Then there was a period when Mama didn’t care to see me, barely answered when I spoke to her, sent the others out of the room for making too much noise and littering the floor with their torn envelopes and tangerine peels. She asked only for Saul. Wanted him to read to her from her big old family Bible: Psalms. She didn’t like the rest of the Bible any more, people undertaking definite activities or journeying to specific towns. Saul would read until his voice cracked, and come downstairs pale and exhausted. “I did the best I could,” he would say. You would think this was his mother. First he’d had Alberta and now he had Mama, and here I was with nobody.
“What more could I have done?” he asked.
“If you don’t know, who does?” I said.
Her bedroom hung over our heads like some huge gray dirigible. She hulked in our minds; her absence filled the house.
I took to keeping the studio open at night. You’d be surprised at the people who decide to get photographed at ten or eleven p.m. if they pass by and see a place lit. They would stop at the bay window—solitary teenagers, men who couldn’t sleep, housewives going out for tomorrow morning’s milk. They would stare at my pictures, all my portraits of people bedecked with Alberta’s clutter and dimmed by the crackling, imperfect light that seeped through my father’s worn