The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [229]
As well as slipping around in his stocking feet, Little Thomas was quiet and rarely could be coaxed into a conversation. He was quiet and troubled—that much the family would finally allow, though they refused to admit that there were any real problems. It was said he was troubled because he’d had to wear glasses as a child. Or because his father was so personable that he’d presented his son with a hard act to follow. Later, Little Thomas’s asthma was blamed, and then his guilt over the fact that Punkin Puppy, the family’s russet-colored mutt, had to be given away because of Little Thomas’s allergies. Growing up, I heard these things over and over. The reasons were like a mantra, or like the stages of grief being explained—the steps from denial to acceptance. By the time he was a teenager, it was no longer a question just of his being troubled but of his actively troubling others. Garden hoses were turned on in the neighbors’ gardens late at night, washing their flowers away in great landslides of mud; brown bags filled with dog excrement were set burning on some neighbor’s porch, so whoever opened the door would be ankle deep in dog shit when he stomped out the flames. Things got worse, and then Little Thomas was sent away to a special school.
Yesterday I visited my mother in her new apartment in Alexandria. She was afraid of crime in downtown Washington and thought she should relocate. Her nurse-companion came with her, a kindhearted woman named Zalla, who attended the school of nursing at American University two nights a week and every summer. When she got her nursing degree, Zalla intended to return to her home, Belize, where she was going to work in a hospital. The hospital was still under construction. Building had to be stopped when the architect was accused of embezzling; then the hurricane struck. But Zalla had faith that the hospital would be completed, that she would eventually graduate from nursing school, and that—though this went unsaid—she would not be with my mother forever. My mother has emphysema and diabetes, and needs someone with her. Zalla cooks and washes and does any number of things no one expects her to do, and during the day she’s never off her feet. At night she watches James Bond movies over and over on my mother’s VCR. My mother sits in the TV room with her, rereading Dickens. She says the James Bond movies provide wonderful soundtracks for the stories: Carly Simon singing “Nobody Does It Better” in The Spy Who Loved Me as my mother’s reading about Mr. Pickwick.
Anyway, what happened was in no way Zalla’s fault, but she was tortured by guilt. Days after the incident I’m going to tell about, which I heard of when I visited, Zalla was still upset.
That Monday, my mother had checked into Sibley Hospital for a day of tests. In the afternoon, there was a knock on the door and Zalla looked out of the peephole and saw Little Thomas. She’d met him several times through the years, so of course she let him in. He said he was there to return some dishes my mother had let him borrow when he was setting up housekeeping. He also wanted to say goodbye, because he was moving out of the apartment he’d been sharing with other people in Landover, Maryland, and was headed down to the Florida Keys to tend bar. Then he worked the conversation around to asking Zalla for a loan: fifty dollars, which he’d send back as soon as he got to Key West and opened a bank account and deposited some checks. She had thirty-some dollars and gave him everything she had, minus the bus fare she needed to get to Sibley Hospital that evening. He asked for a sheet of paper so he could write a goodbye note to my mother, and Zalla found him a notepad. He sat at the kitchen table, writing. It didn’t occur to her to stand over him. She unpacked the dishes and loaded them into the dishwasher, and then tidied up in the TV room. He wrote and wrote. He was writing my mother a nasty note, telling her that through therapy he had come to realize that the family perpetuated harmful myths, and that no one had ever chosen to “come clean