Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [85]
“Can you just get in a cab? Geez. Why do you have to be so difficult?”
“Oh, now I’m the difficult one?”
“You’ve always been the difficult one!”
“I have had just about enough. I don’t have to listen to one more minute of this—”
She hung up. My phone rang a minute later.
“Hello?”
“It’s Mother. I wanted to let you know I just put in a call to Bill Shames, my lawyer in St. Louis, because I am going to SUE YOU for everything you’ve got, which I realize, hah, isn’t much.”
“You’re suing me?”
“That’s right, baby.”
“For what?”
“For acting like an insensitive maniac.”
“You’re suing me for acting like an insensitive maniac?”
“That’s right. You’ll be hearing from my attorney, dearie.”
I should have picked her up.
There was blood on her couch from the day she had the stroke. My father called me the day before we were to go clean my mother’s apartment.
“Now, Jean-Joe, should I go over to Mama’s and take the bloody couch out of view so that you girls don’t have to be traumatized by seeing that? Is seeing that awful blood on Mama’s couch going to be . . . uh, traumatizing, do you think? Although where in the hell am I going to drag a bloody couch to . . . I’ll probably get arrested . . . I suppose I could just throw a blanket over the bloodstains on the couch so you wouldn’t have to see all that blood. I could always do that.” It would simply never occur to my father that perhaps repeating the words “bloody,” “Mama,” “stains,” and “couch” in various combinations might have taken care of whatever traumatizing remained to be done.
We divvied up the jobs at the beginning of each day there, and today I was on clothes. I wondered whether I would find any Lenox Hill Hospital robes. Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side used to have these really chic robes—blue-and-white seersucker, shortish. My mother was a regular there when she lived on East Eighty-seventh Street, and my sisters and I couldn’t get enough of them. The problem was that our friends also took a shine to these bad boys, and before you knew it we were fielding requests from all over town.
“Jean, hey, it’s Sophia. I don’t want to be insensitive, but if your mom goes to detox again in the near future, could you nab me a medium?”
I didn’t find any of the robes. I put things in bags that would go in the garbage. I didn’t want to give any of it to Goodwill, because I am a serious thrifter and I was horrified at the idea of coming across any of my mother’s things in a secondhand store. Though from the apartment I was the only one of us who took anything wearable, anything that required putting a piece of my mother’s smell anywhere near me. Nothing could compete with the way my mother smelled at the end. The cigarettes, the old vodka smell mixed with the new vodka smell, the greasy hair, the hundred-dollar-an-ounce Parisian stench called Joy. I think Kate sent my mother’s jewelry to the dry cleaners. Figuring I could wash things a few hundred times, I took one totally queer yellow-and-navy-blue-striped boat-neck shirt from L.L.Bean, one fantastic Indian-print muumuu from the ’60s, a cream-colored cashmere sweater from L.L.Bean, one navy-blue wool jacket that my dad gave her from Brooks Brothers. She had never even been on the Internet, so L.L.Bean catalogs became her only option for clothes, her one-stop shut-in shop. I don’t know why I took these clothes, because they were not clothes that represented her particularly.
Later that day while Julia worked on the kitchen, I transferred myself from closets to the bookshelves, which were loaded with crap. My mother didn’t have affairs, she read commercial fiction to make my father insane. There was also the matter of her tendency when she went to rehab to stash money in books, so each book had to be gone through before being sent to Goodwill. It was genetic; her mother, not a drinker, was also a cash stasher, although