“Oh, of course.”
Molly told her about the bits of ocher the digital tracing had connected, and if her mother sounded less enthusiastic than Molly had expected, Molly attributed that to the weather. The weather was terrible in New York. It snowed and the bitter wind blew, and Joy could not leave her building.
“Well, this will cheer you up, Mom. One of the grad students in engineering built a drone and we attached a 3-D camera and…”
Joy drifted from room to room, listening, aimless, trapped.
It wasn’t that Joy expected her daughter, and certainly not her son, to come live with her. They had their own lives, just as she had once had her own life. She did expect something from them, though, something they were not providing, she couldn’t put her finger on it. Danny was coming once a week for dinner now, Molly planned a trip to New York in the near future, and Joy waited eagerly for their visits. But visits predicted their own end, and an end to a visit meant she would be alone again.
There is a difference between solitude and loneliness, she thought, and wondered what it was.
She should have spent more time with her own mother. She should have moved in with her mother to take care of her, she saw that now. So what if her mother’s apartment had been an L-shaped studio? So what if her mother kept it at 102 degrees and could not stand the smell of any food cooking except white rice, and so what if she talked and talked and talked and lived in the past? Now that Joy was older, she understood her mother. It was cold, that was why the heat in the apartment was turned up so high. Her mother’s ceaseless talking was an activity, a way for her to be alive. As for living in the past, the past was all that was real.
Joy would move right in with her mother now, if she could. Daniel and Molly were not old enough, not lonely enough, not cold enough to understand. And what would they do with their wives? And how was it that she had a daughter and a son and they both had wives, anyway?
No one, not even an old lady, wants to live in someone else’s house. Both Molly and Daniel had asked her to move in with them, naturally, just as she had asked her own mother to move in with her. They were good, devoted children, just as she had been. They didn’t really mean it, just as she had not really meant it.
Rich or poor, her mother used to say, it’s better to have money.
Aaron, you were not a prince among men. You were not. You were a weak man. You squandered your fortune like a prince, but you were not a prince. She thought fondly of his affectations of dress, the tweed cap when other men wore brimmed hats, the custom-made English shirts and shoes. How handsome he was, his beard groomed, his hair tousled. It had been so long since she had thought of him as handsome. But now she had trouble picturing him when he hadn’t been handsome, when he’d grown bent and stiff and hollow, when his lips were chapped and his teeth dulled, when his eyes went blank, when his clothes devolved into the clothes of a small child, the elastic-waist sweatpants, the hooded sweatshirt that he could not zip himself. Those images were fading. Instead, she could feel her head on his shoulder and his hand running through her hair. She could hear his breath in her ear, feel it, soft and warm. As she tried to fall asleep each night, she saw him as she had first seen him, a young man with no beard, his eyes a watery blue, his jacket handmade in Scotland, she later discovered, his large hand held out as he asked her to dance.
The memories did not comfort her. They made her feel the years that had passed and that, like Aaron, would never return. They made her old. Sometimes, when she got up to go to the bathroom, she caught sight of herself in the mirror and thought it was her grandfather. All she had to do was spit some tobacco. The smell of her grandfather and his chewing tobacco came back to her, and she got back into bed, sleepless and sick to her stomach.
When Danny came to dinner, he always said, “I’ll bring a roast chicken from Gourmet Garage so you won’t have to cook.”