I wondered how much it had cost her. Probably a dollar or two. She was a very nice woman; she just didn’t know me.

  My mother, the confounding optimist, always said that her greatest regrets in life were things she didn’t buy. Then again, she was better at answering simple questions than I was and at clearly saying what she wanted.

  The estate-sale crew—the boss, and a friendly lady with a thick Boston accent, and two or three other young men—stood behind the folding tables with the valuable items: some jewelry; cameras (my father had owned hundreds; these were the priciest); a small archive of papers about the founding of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which my father must have got at an antique store; a draft of the screenplay of Misery, an utter mystery; some foreign money. A painting of a sideshow by a great-aunt. Boxes of old toys.

  The drunk neighbor came by. She was a nice woman whom I’d never seen sober, about my age, with doleful blue eyes. She hugged me, as she had the other times we’d met; it was still the age of casual hugs. We stood together in my mother’s driveway and she said, “You’ll always remember her.” Yes, I said. “Love doesn’t end with death.” No. “Like my son,” she said, “he’s been dead fourteen years now, and it’s like it was yesterday. That kid. He was such a good guy. You know about my son? He finished college and he said, Ma, I’m going to New Zealand. You know: He was young. So he went to New Zealand, and he went everywhere on a motorcycle—wasn’t crazy about that, but everywhere he went, he wrote. Pictures, you know, here we are, pictures of the ocean: He surfed. Then he was staying with friends. And one morning he woke up, and I guess he forgot where he was, and he opened the door, and he stepped out, except there wasn’t anything out this door, it was a straight drop down, and he just fell. And he was there for hours. And the lady who found him—oh my God,” said my mother’s drunk neighbor, with the smile of a person speaking about the theoretically unspeakable, who only wants you to listen; I have worn that smile myself. “My God, I feel so sorry for that lady.”

  The decanters sold, but none of the teacups. The art sold, but none of the furniture. Some books. My parents had never used this back door—no banister, too small. A large unkempt man came through it, clutching some china figurines that I had last seen in Des Moines, Iowa. Big head, square Joan of Arc haircut. He looked like a nerdy ogre. “People!” he said. “You know, I was up there, and some guy turns to me and says, ‘This place is a dump,’ and I tell him, ‘Listen, this is somebody’s home.’ Respect. Respect. You don’t know. You don’t know the whole story. Maybe there’s not family there. Maybe they don’t have kids looking after them. Sure, it’s not ideal. But you don’t know. There were old people living here. You can tell that. Sad stories everywhere. Could happen to you.” He laughed, stepped off the little concrete stage and onto the driveway. “I’m telling you, man. Families.”

  Even before my mother’s disastrous surgery in 2011, my parents were prolific callers of 911. My mother was so stiff that if she fell down, she couldn’t get herself up, and my father, also unsteady on his feet, couldn’t help her. So they called the EMTs. Far away in Texas, I was only sort of aware of this.

  One of the oddities of her long incarceration was that, at the very end, my parents ended up in the same nursing home, in the same room. I can’t remember what my father had gone into the hospital for, only that he asked to be discharged to this particularly awful nursing home for the two days of physical therapy they insisted he needed. Perhaps I sound cynical. Despite my conversations with the social workers, my mother was deemed fit for discharge only the day before her annual Medicare nursing-home benefit ran out. My father would be sprung first, and I flew to help get the house in order. I’d already arranged for a long metal ramp to be installed off their wooden front porch—my father hadn’t liked the aesthetics of it—and hired cleaners who specialized in crime scenes. My father was so delighted by his freedom that he celebrated by drinking, and so miserable about the cleaning that he treated the misery by drinking, and then, unaccustomed after his hospital stay to drinking, he stopped. By early evening, he called me—I was staying at a friend’s nearby—and said, “My chest hurts. Do you think I should call an ambulance?” Yes, I said, I’d be right there.

  The EMTs and I arrived at the same time. As they took my father away on a gurney—he was fine, just hungover—one of the EMTs told me, “This house is way cleaner than the last time we were here.”

  So my father was in the hospital when my mother finally came home. She had ordered herself a hospital bed from Amazon and a diminutive armchair with a lift to set her on her feet, though she still couldn’t walk—she’d gone into the hospital not walking, had returned not walking—and she needed human help. She’d hired members of two families of women, Irish and Haitian, and for a while there was somebody there twenty-four hours a day. My father came home. I flew back to Texas. My dear friend Marguerite, herself familiar with domestic chaos, familiar with my parents since she and I were teenagers, stopped by to check in for me. Things were good, she reported. In a voice of wonder, she added, “I think they’re better than they have been for years.” She meant: The aides kept the house clean, and made sure my parents got out, and opened windows, and kept everything oiled and working. For the first time in years, I didn’t have to worry about a catastrophe: my parents dying in a fire, my father dying of a heart attack and leaving my mother, unable to get out of bed, to starve to death. The house no longer felt like a booby trap.

  Those strange and bustling women drove my father nuts. He didn’t walk much by then, either. He ordered rollators—extra-large rolling walkers, the sort with hand brakes and a fold-down bit you could sit on—and he sat and used his feet to roll through the house backward. He bought a number of reachers, long aluminum arms with a trigger at one end and a pinching mechanism at the other for picking up distant things. In this way my father made himself over into an unambitious robot.

  One night when they’d been home—out of the jug, as my father put it—for a couple of months, he called me up, his voice sodden with chardonnay but joyous. “I did it!” he said. “I lifted your mother into her bed!”

  What? My mother’s hospital bed was in the dining room, along the wall where the bookshelves had once been. It wasn’t a good hospital bed, but it was good enough, motorized so that it could go up and down, and with a railing so that in the middle of the night my mother could grab hold of it to rearrange her body when she cramped up.

  “Where were the aides?” I asked.

  “I had to wait till they went out.” He was crowing; that was the only word for it. “It took a lot of practice, but I did it!”

  I tried to picture what had happened. My father in his rollator snugged up next to my mother in her wheelchair. His long arms fitting in around her. She’d wince or she’d bite back the pain, because this was important to him. She was terrible at telling him no. Conditioned not to. Certain mid-century failings, as I said. I didn’t think he could have really lifted her. At most, he might have bobbled her to the edge of the bed and rolled her over.

  “Maybe soon,” said my father, and now his voice wasn’t merely proud but full of fury, “maybe finally we can get rid of these goddamn women.”

  The story of my mother’s life was not the triumph over the body but the triumph of the body. My father’s was not. My mother said that in the 1950s my father was the tallest person in any crowd; she could look across any room and find him. In those days he was thin or mildly portly. My mother commented on his long arms, how he could reach out and snag something off a table seemingly across the room. She knew the measure of all limbs. Her own arms were short, and she cursed them. She had, she said often, her father’s arms; he had his shirts tailored especially for his stumpy appendages. Did my mother know these things about her own body because she lived in it or because she was the daughter of a clothing-shop owner? Her shoulders were so narrow, shoulder bags slid from them, and she owned special hooked brooches that pinned on like epaulets to catch straps. She was short-waisted, small-busted, particularly compared to her bosomy mother. She was short, though not always: She and her twin sister had been, she assured me, the tallest kids in school till the fourth grade, and then they just stopped. Four foot eleven and three-quarter inches, she told me. For a long time I believed if she stood as straight as possible—if she steadied herself on a wall and assumed her full height—she would be that tall, a tiny bit taller than me. But I don’t think that’s true.

  My mother had always found a way to go. She got her driver’s license as a teenager and drove our various terrible family cars, one foot on the gas and one on the brake, which was theoretically illegal but all her stiff legs were capable of. The first car I remember is our Renault, brought back from Paris on a boat, which eventually wouldn’t reverse; my parents kept driving it anyhow. We had a Volvo that had to be turned on with a screwdriver. An enormous early-1970s (it was the mid-1980s) green Cadillac with a bench seat, perhaps the very reason I didn’t learn to drive till years later, because my long-legged father couldn’t sit in the front seat with me, and my short-legged mother couldn’t see over the dashboard to give me useful advice. Finally, the navy-blue Caddy with the broken driver’s seat, which my father fixed with a case of empty beer bottles at a convenient distance from the pedals for him. My mother would have needed two cases of beer. That’s when she stopped driving at all.

  My father didn’t take care of his body any better than he took care of cars. He liked both cream sauces and deep-fried food. He liked both red wine and Drambuie. Sometimes he smoked: menthols, cloves, cigars. After his first heart attack, in his fifties, he reformed for a while, put a treadmill in the basement and changed his diet and drank only red wine. I’m not sure when the reformation ended. One of the reasons he hated having the aides around: their disapproval of his various cherished bad habits—eating what he wanted; drinking wine when he wanted; snapping at my mother for small irritations as he had for decades. Worse, the aides were sympathetic to my mother but less so to him, as everyone was. You made your body, now you have to lie in it.

  “Don’t lift her,” I said to him on the phone, even though I knew it would make him angry. He wasn’t asking my permission; he only wanted to share his happiness. “It’s not safe.”

  But he and my mother knew: When you’re old, safety is overrated. Safety is the bossy Irish lady, who is, after all, your employee, taking away your wineglass, saying, “That’s enough, that’s enough now, that’s enough now, darlin’.” Safety puts you in a nursing home and turns you over regularly so that you do not die in your sleep. You could be kept for years if you weren’t careful, like a roped-off chair in a museum that nobody is allowed to sit in, which makes it only something shaped like a chair. Watch out for safety. It will make you no longer yourself, only an object shaped that way.

  After my father’s memorial service I took my mother to New York, drove her back to Boston, and slept on the sofa for the few hours before my early-morning flight. At 2:00 A.M., I heard my mother calling for me: She’d got herself out of bed to go to the bathroom, but she’d forgotten to ask me to take off her socks and had slid to the ground, unhurt. One of her talents. I tried to lift her, but she was so stiff, and I so weak, I could get her only inches off the ground. “Call 911,” she said. “I can’t call 911 just to lift you,” I said, exhausted, semi-conscious. It felt immoral to me, or illegal. I tried to lift her over and over. “Hand me the phone and I’ll call,” said my mother, and she did, and they got her up, made her sign a piece of paper that said she refused to be taken to the hospital, and left. Routine, for everyone but me. My biceps were sore for a week afterward.

  On the evening of Halloween 2018, my mother called to say that she’d fallen and the paramedics had come and put her in her recliner and she was absolutely fine. “Are you sure?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, though she sounded uncharacteristically shaken. I can’t remember everything we said, but she was concerned, as she often was, about her walking. “I’m especially stiff,” she said. “Who do you think we can get to help me with my perambulation?” I suggested some people we could ask.

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” I said.

  She said, “Goody.” Then she said, “So what’s the agenda?”

  “What agenda?”

  She repeated, “Who can we get to help me with my perambulation?”

  “I’m sure we’ll think of somebody,” I said. I remembered the kind, puppyish doctor who’d said to me years before, At this age, nearly everything manifests as confusion. She was shaken up. She’d just been seen by medical professionals. I would talk to her first thing tomorrow.

  But the next person I talked to was somebody who called at three in the morning from the hospital, to say that my mother had been admitted. She was unconscious. They hadn’t yet figured out why.

  I still don’t know who summoned the EMTs a second time.

  In London, I’d planned to wander the whole day, from museum to museum, pub to restaurant, but the fabric of my wandering started to unravel, from tiredness or sorrow. My knee hurt. There were too many people. I wasn’t lonely, I told myself severely. I knew people who lived in London, but their numbers weren’t in my cheap phone. Once upon a time I might have found an internet café, back in the days when the cities of the world were full of such things, before we all became self-sufficient. I thought about dialing my childhood phone number, my mother’s phone number, though nobody would have answered. The house was empty; the phones had been unplugged; the phone number existed only because the internet did, and the internet existed because I hadn’t managed to unplug it yet. There were so many things that naturally ended when a person died, and so many things you had to put a stop to.

  Ahead of me, Big Ben was hidden in a sleeve of scaffolding—no, not Big Ben, as my father would have pointed out; Big Ben was the bell, not the clock, not the clock tower. The day was warm but tolerable. I went more slowly than I would have if my mother were still alive and heading down the sidewalk on her scooter. She was always in a hurry, especially in cities, headed to a museum or a theater. Sometimes she would hit the throttle so hard I had to run to keep up with her, or I’d lose her in the crowd.

  There were three productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in London that summer. The best-reviewed was near Tower Bridge on the South Bank. There might still be tickets. My mother would have called it Midsummer; I liked to tease her about her abridgements of play titles. Streetcar, Salesman—the casual inside references of the True Theater Person. My father was a minor theater person, a scholar, one foot firmly in the text, and he disapproved of setting Shakespeare anywhere but in the time specified by Shakespeare himself, disapproved of any costumes that didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s time or before. I am a purist; you are unimaginative; he is an old stick-in-the-mud. In my childhood we went to a lot of plays as a family. My father would drop us off at the entrance before parking the car; we would go in, settle into our seats. Somehow my father always managed to arrive just as the lights dimmed, and you could hear the palpable, complicated outrage of the person in the seat behind him, realizing their good luck—a clear view of the stage—had turned to the worst possible luck, a total eclipse. Also, my father tended to fall asleep and snore.

  By the time I was a teenager, I was my mother’s usual theater date, being open-minded if still judgmental. I was an audience member: I might dislike a production, but I never thought of how I would have done things differently. My mother recast in her mind, re-costumed, re-blocked. As far as I know, once she gave up the theater—sometime before I was born, or before I was sentient—she never dabbled, except to think about it. It wasn’t in her nature to be an amateur at anything. As a young woman in New York, she got standing-room-only tickets, stood to see Under Milk Wood and Auntie Mame. I try to picture her: short, unsteady but upright, before the major surgery of her adulthood, which happened when I was four or so and from which, I think, she never really recovered. I can’t see her. There are old films of her and her sister as small children in their backyard but no footage of my mother walking: You would have to notice her serious shoes, unlike her twin sister’s patent Mary Janes; her place in the little red wagon (filmed in black-and-white but manifestly red; I remember my mother’s stories); her chair with more support and arms for her to hold on to. Once, she came to visit having given up coffee—“You, give up coffee?” I said in a shocked voice. “I don’t think I understand who you are without coffee”—and was so sleepy I had to put her in a similar chair because she kept nodding off and threatening to tumble to the floor. She could fall asleep anywhere. Her greatest feat was dozing off in the Museum of Modern Art with her hand on the throttle of her scooter. She nearly rolled through an installation that involved a pile of sand on the floor. My job at the theater was to nudge her awake, though I inherited the family somnolence and we often napped in tandem.

  The last play I saw with my mother, ever, was in London, at an older theater. We’d discovered on one of our trips to New York that if you go to the theater in a scooter or a wheelchair, there are often tickets available at the last minute for you and your companion. Companion is the official term. The locations vary in quality—sometimes excellently up close, sometimes at the very back of the house. At this last theater of our lives together, we entered at ground level; instead of going up, the house went down, the stage many feet below street level. This sounds like a dream as I describe it now, or a made-up place. It’s not a made-up place, though this is a novel, and the theater might be fictional, and my insistence fictional, and my mother the only real thing, though this version of her is also fictional. In this theater the spot for my mother’s scooter was a little platform to drive out on. It was much higher than my seat next to her—not satisfactory—so I couldn’t nudge her or even see her, and by and by as the actors spoke, their voices got garbled and they said things that confused me and I had fallen asleep and was already being woken by an usher saying, as though he’d found me tucked under the covers in a character’s bed on the stage itself, “You can’t sleep here!”

 

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