Larry Hadlock is at the side of the house. Traffic moves slowly on the street out in front, and the sun has started down over the trees. I can hear the commotion the mower makes. Some crows leave the phone line and settle onto the newly cut grass in the front yard.
“I’m going to miss you, honey,” my mother says. Then she says, “I’ll miss you, too, Jill. I’m going to miss both of you.”
Jill sips from her coffee and nods. Then she says, “I hope you have a safe trip back and find the place you’re looking for at the end of the road.”
“When I get settled—and this is my last move, so help me—I hope you’ll come and visit,” my mother says. She looks at me and waits to be reassured.
“We will,” I say. But even as I say it I know it isn’t true. My life caved in on me down there, and I won’t be going back.
“I wish you could have been happier here,” Jill says. “I wish you’d been able to stick it out or something.
You know what? Your son is worried sick about you.”
“Jill,” I say.
But she gives her head a little shake and goes on. “Sometimes he can’t sleep over it. He wakes up sometimes in the night and says, ‘I can’t sleep. I’m thinking about my mother.’ There,” she says and looks at me. “I’ve said it. But it was on my mind.”
“How do you think I must feel?” my mother says. Then she says, “Other women my age can be happy.
Why can’t I be like other women? All I want is a house and a town to live in that will make me happy.
That isn’t a crime, is it? I hope not. I hope I’m not asking too much out of life.” She puts her cup on the floor next to her chair and waits for Jill to tell her she isn’t asking for too much. But Jill doesn’t say anything, and in a minute my mother begins to outline her plans to be happy.
After a time Jill lowers her eyes to her cup and has some more coffee. I can tell she’s stopped listening.
But my mother keeps talking anyway. The crows work their way through the grass in the front yard. I hear the mower howl and then thud as it picks up a clump of grass in the blade and comes to a stop. In a minute, after several tries, Larry gets it going again. The crows fly off, back to their wire. Jill picks at a fingernail. My mother is saying that the secondhand-furniture dealer is coming around the next morning to collect the things she isn’t going to send on the bus or carry with her in the car. The table and chairs, TV, sofa, and bed are going with the dealer. But he’s told her he doesn’t have any use for the card table, so my mother is going to throw it out unless we want it.
“We’ll take it,” I say. Jill looks over. She starts to say something but changes her mind.
I will drive the boxes to the Greyhound station the next afternoon and start them on the way to California. My mother will spend the last night with us, as arranged. And then, early the next morning, two days from now, she’ll be on her way.
She continues to talk. She talks on and on as she describes the trip she is about to make. She’ll drive until four o’clock in the afternoon and then take a motel room for the night. She figures to make Eugene by dark. Eugene is a nice town—she stayed there once before, on the way up here. When she leaves the motel, she’ll leave at sunrise and should, if God is looking out for her, be in California that afternoon.
And God is looking out for her, she knows he is. How else explain her being kept around on the face of the earth? He has a plan for her. She’s been praying a lot lately. She’s been praying for me, too.
“Why are you praying for him?” Jill wants to know.
“Because I feel like it. Because he’s my son,” my mother says. “Is there anything the matter with that?
Don’t we all need praying for sometimes? Maybe some people don’t. I don’t know. What do I know anymore?” She brings a hand to her forehead and rearranges some hair that’s come loose from a pin.
The mower sputters off, and pretty soon we see Larry go around the house pulling the hose. He sets the hose out and then goes slowly back around the house to turn the water on. The sprinkler begins to turn.
My mother starts listing the ways she imagines Larry has wronged her since she’s been in the house. But now I’m not listening, either. I am thinking how she is about to go down the highway again, and nobody can reason with her or do anything to stop her. What can I do? I can’t tie her up, or commit her, though it may come to that eventually. I worry for her, and she is a heartache to me. She is all the family I have left. I’m sorry she didn’t like it here and wants to leave. But I’m never going back to California. And when that’s clear to me I understand something else, too. I under stand that after she leaves I’m probably never going to see her again.
I look over at my mother. She stops talking. Jill raises her eyes. Both of them look at me.
“What is it, honey?” my mother says. “What’s wrong?” Jill says.
I lean forward in the chair and cover my face with my hands. I sit like that for a minute, feeling bad and stupid for doing it. But I can’t help it. And the woman who brought me into this life, and this other woman I picked up with less than a year ago, they exclaim together and rise and come over to where I sit with my head in my hands like a fool. I don’t open my eyes. I listen to the sprinkler whipping the grass.
“What’s wrong? What’s the matter?” they say.
“It’s okay,” I say. And in a minute it is. I open my eyes and bring my head up. I reach for a cigarette.
“See what I mean?” Jill says. “You’re driving him crazy. He’s going crazy with worry over you.” She is on one side of my chair, and my mother is on the other side. They could tear me apart in no time at all.
“I wish I could die and get out of everyone’s way,” my mother says quietly. “So help me Hannah, I can’t take much more of this.”
“How about some more coffee?” I say. “Maybe we ought to catch the news,” I say. “Then I guess Jill and I better head for home.”
Two days later, early in the morning,
I say good-bye to my mother for what may be the last time. I’ve let Jill sleep. It won’t hurt if she’s late to work for a change. The dogs can wait for their baths and trimmings and such. My mother holds my arm as I walk her down the steps to the driveway and open the car door for her. She is wearing white slacks and a white blouse and white sandals. Her hair is pulled back and tied with a scarf. That’s white, too. It’s going to be a nice day, and the sky is clear and already blue.
On the front seat of the car I see maps and a thermos of coffee. My mother looks at these things as if she can’t recall having come outside with them just a few minutes ago. She turns to me then and says, “Let me hug you once more. Let me love your neck. I know I won’t see you for a long time.” She puts an arm around my neck, draws me to her, and then begins to cry. But she stops almost at once and steps back, pushing the heel of her hand against her eyes. “I said I wouldn’t do that, and I won’t. But let me get a last look at you anyway. I’ll miss you, honey,” she says.
“I’m just going to have to live through this. I’ve already lived through things I didn’t think were possible.
But I’ll live through this, too, I guess.” She gets into the car, starts it, and runs the engine for a minute.
She rolls her window down.
“I’m going to miss you,” I say. And I am going to miss her. She’s my mother, after all, and why shouldn’t I miss her? But, God forgive me, I’m glad, too, that it’s finally time and that she is leaving.
“Good-bye,” she says. “Tell Jill thanks for supper last night. Tell her I said goodbye.”
“I will,” I say. I stand there wanting to say something else. But I don’t know what. We keep looking at each other, trying to smile and reassure each other. Then something comes into her eyes, and I believe she is thinking about the highway and how far she is going to have to drive that day. She takes her eyes off me and looks down the road. Then she rolls her window up, puts the car into gear, and drives to the intersection,
where she has to wait for the light to change. When I see she’s made it into traffic and headed toward the highway, I go back in the house and drink some coffee. I feel sad for a while, and then the sadness goes away and I start thinking about other things.
A few nights later my mother calls to say she is in her new place. She is busy fixing it up, the way she does when she has a new place. She tells me I’ll be happy to know she likes it just fine to be back in sunny California. But she says there’s something in the air where she is living, maybe it’s pollen, that is causing her to sneeze a lot. And the traffic is heavier than she remembers from before. She doesn’t recall there being so much traffic in her neighborhood. Naturally, everyone still drives like crazy down there. “California drivers,” she says.
“What else can you expect?” She says it’s hot for this time of the year. She doesn’t think the airconditioning unit in her apartment is working right. I tell her she should talk to the manager. “She’s never around when you need her,” my mother says. She hopes she hasn’t made a mistake in moving back to California. She waits before she says anything else.
I’m standing at the window with the phone pressed to my ear, looking out at the lights from town and at the lighted houses closer by. Jill is at the table with the catalogue, listening.
“Are you still there?” my mother asks. “I wish you’d say something.”
I don’t know why, but it’s then I recall the affectionate name my dad used sometimes when he was talking nice to my mother—those times, that is, when he wasn’t drunk. It was a long time ago, and I was a kid, but always, hearing it, I felt better, less afraid, more hopeful about the future. “Dear,” he’d say. He called her “dear” sometimes—a sweet name. “Dear,” he’d say, “if you’re going to the store, will you bring me some cigarettes?” Or “Dear, is your cold any better?” “Dear, where is my coffee cup?”
The word issues from my lips before I can think what else I want to say to go along with it. “Dear.” I say it again. I call her “dear.” “Dear, try not to be afraid,” I say. I tell my mother I love her and I’ll write to her, yes. Then I say good-bye, and I hang up.
For a while I don’t move from the window. I keep standing there, looking out at the lighted houses in our neighborhood. As I watch, a car turns off the road and pulls into a driveway. The porch light goes on.
The door to the house opens and someone comes out on the porch and stands there waiting.
Jill turns the pages of her catalogue, and then she stops turning them. “This is what we want,” she says.
“This is more like what I had in mind. Look at this, will you.” But I don’t look. I don’t care five cents for curtains. “What is it you see out there, honey?” Jill says. “Tell me.”
What’s there to tell? The people over there embrace for a minute, and then they go inside the house together. They leave the light burning. Then they remember, and it goes out.
Whoever Was Using This Bed
The call comes in the middle of the night, three in the morning, and it nearly scares us to death.
“Answer it, answer it!” my wife cries. “My God, who is it? Answer it!”
I can’t find the light, but I get to the other room, where the phone is, and pick it up after the fourth ring.
“Is Bud there?” this woman says, very drunk.
“Jesus, you have the wrong number,” I say, and hang up.
I turn the light on, and go into the bathroom, and that’s when I hear the phone start again.
“Answer that!” my wife screams from the bedroom. “What in God’s name do they want, Jack? I can’t take any more.”
I hurry out of the bathroom and pick up the phone.
“Bud?” the woman says. “What are you doing, Bud?”
I say, “Look here. You have a wrong number. Don’t ever call this number again.”
“I have to talk to Bud,” she says.
I hang up, wait until it rings again, and then I take the receiver and lay it on the table beside the phone.
But I hear the woman’s voice say, “Bud, talk to me, please.” I leave the receiver on its side on the table, turn off the light, and close the door to the room.
In the bedroom I find the lamp on and my wife, Iris, sitting against the headboard with her knees drawn up under the covers. She has a pillow behind her back, and she’s more on my side than her own side. The covers are up around her shoulders. The blankets and the sheet have been pulled out from the foot of the bed. If we want to go back to sleep—I want to go back to sleep, anyway—we may have to start from scratch and do this bed over again.
“What the hell was that all about?” Iris says. “We should have unplugged the phone. I guess we forgot.
Try forgetting one night to unplug the phone and see what happens. I don’t believe it.”
After Iris and I started living together, my former wife, or else one of my kids, used to call up when we were asleep and want to harangue us. They kept doing it even after Iris and I were married. So we started unplugging our phone before we went to bed. We unplugged the phone every night of the year, just about. It was a habit. This time I slipped up, that’s all.
“Some woman wanting Bud,” I say. I’m standing there in my pajamas, wanting to get into bed, but I can’t. “She was drunk. Move over, honey. I took the phone off the hook.”
“She can’t call again?”
“No,” I say. “Why don’t you move over a little and give me some of those covers?”
She takes her pillow and puts it on the far side of the bed, against the headboard, scoots over, and then she leans back once more. She doesn’t look sleepy. She looks fully awake. I get into bed and take some covers. But the covers don’t feel right. I don’t have any sheet; all I have is blanket. I look down and see my feet sticking out. I turn onto my side, facing her, and bring my legs up so that my feet are under the blanket. We should make up the bed again. I ought to suggest that. But I’m thinking, too, that if we kill the light now, this minute, we might be able to go right back to sleep.
“How about you turning off your light, honey?” I say, as nice as I can.
“Let’s have a cigarette first,” she says. “Then we’ll go to sleep. Get us the cigarettes and the ashtray, why don’t you? We’ll have a cigarette.”
“Let’s go to sleep,” I say. “Look at what time it is.” The clock radio is right there beside the bed. Anyone can see it says three-thirty.
“Come on,” Iris says. “I need a cigarette after all that.”
I get out of bed for the cigarettes and ashtray. I have to go into the room where the phone is, but I don’t touch the phone. I don’t even want to look at the phone, but I do, of course. The receiver is still on its side on the table.
I crawl back in bed and put the ashtray on the quilt between us. I light a cigarette, give it to her, and then light one for myself.
She tries to remember the dream she was having when the phone rang. “I can just about remember it, but I can’t remember exactly. Something about, about—no, I don’t know what it was about now. I can’t be sure. I can’t remember it,” she says finally. “God damn that woman and her phone call. ‘Bud,’” she says.
“I’d like to punch her.” She puts out her cigarette and immediately lights another, blows smoke, and lets her eyes take in the chest of drawers and the window curtains. Her hair is undone and around her shoulders. She uses the ashtray and then stares over the foot of the bed, trying to remember.
But, really, I don’t care what she’s dreamed. I want-to go back to sleep is all. I finish my cigarette and put it out and wait for her to finish. I lie still and don’t say anything.
Iris is like my former wife in that when she sleeps she sometimes has violent dreams. She thrashes around in bed during the night and wakes in the morning drenched with sweat, the nightgown sticking to her body. And, like my former wife, she wants to tell me her dreams in great detail and speculate as to what this stands for or that portends. My former wife
used to kick the covers off in the night and cry out in her sleep, as if someone were laying hands on her. Once, in a particularly violent dream, she hit me on the ear with her fist. I was in a dreamless sleep, but I struck out in the dark and hit her on the forehead.
Then we began yelling. We both yelled and yelled. We’d hurt each other, but we were mainly scared.
We had no idea what had happened until I turned the lamp on; then we sorted it out. Afterward, we joked about it—fistfighting in our sleep. But then so much else began to happen that was far more serious we tended to forget about that night. We never mentioned it again, even when we teased each other.
Once I woke up in the night to hear Iris grinding her teeth in her sleep. It was such a peculiar thing to have going on right next to my ear that it woke me up. I gave her a little shake, and she stopped. The next morning she told me she’d had a very bad dream, but that’s all she’d tell me about it. I didn’t press her for details. I guess I really didn’t want to know what could have been so bad that she didn’t want to say. When I told her she’d been grinding her teeth in her sleep, she frowned and said she was going to have to do something about that. The next night she brought home something called a Niteguard-something she was supposed to wear in her mouth while she slept. She had to do something, she said.
She couldn’t afford to keep grinding her teeth; pretty soon she wouldn’t have any. So she wore this protective device in her mouth for a week or so, and then she stopped wearing it. She said it was uncomfortable and, anyway, it was not very cosmetic. Who’d want to kiss a woman wearing a thing like that in her mouth, she said. She had something there, of course.
Another time I woke up because she was stroking my face and calling me Earl. I took her hand and squeezed her fingers. “What is it?” I said. “What is it, sweetheart?” But instead of answering she simply squeezed back, sighed, and then lay still again. The next morning, when I asked her what she’d dreamed the night before, she claimed not to have had any dreams.