I find a tea towel that reads “You don’t stop gardening because you get old, you get old because you stop gardening.” This seems apt for my green-fingered and aphoristically inclined mother, so I buy it for her.
I’m making my way to the exit when I notice a Frisbee that says “You don’t stop playing because you get old, you get old because you stop playing.” Then I pass a mannequin wearing an apron embroidered with “You don’t stop baking because you get old, you get old because you stop baking.” Then I notice the sign by the bookshelf. “You don’t stop reading because …”
When I tell my mother this on the drive home, she laughs so hard she upends the potted daffodils on her knee.
“You don’t stop bullshitting because you get old,” she says.
“You get old because life’s bullshit,” I say.
*
I’ve started seeing dead animals out of the corner of my eye. Some incidents of this are understandable, I think. A flattened leaf on the sidewalk does look like a dead mouse. An abandoned black sneaker trailing its laces is pretty much the same size as a rat. But it’s the cow heads in trash cans and raccoon’s bodies hanging stiff from trees that I’m having a harder time explaining. I google early signs of schizophrenia, mania, and psychosis.
“I think you need to wear your glasses more,” says my mother. “At the bank the other day you read ‘Free Checking’ as ‘Free Chicken.’”
*
I get assigned the copy for a new real estate development on the Upper East Side. It’s designed to be a mini-metropolis. The brief says things like “This paragon of luxury living is a progressive mix of corporate and cutting-edge creative—everything a professional urbanite could need.”
Frank is working on it with me. Since we’re both vegetarian, we walk to the falafel place down the street together. We’re meant to be talking about the 5.8 million square feet of commercial office space, but he’s telling me about his childhood pets instead.
“My mom’s cat Mooshi, now she was an asshole,” he says. “Brigitte was a beautiful angel, a Persian, but they didn’t get along. I was always calling family meetings to get them to figure it out, but eventually Brigitte disappeared.”
“My first pet was a severed raven’s wing,” I tell him. “My mom let me keep it in the garden shed. I was only allowed to pet it if I wore latex gloves from my dad’s practice.”
“Your dad’s a doctor?” asks Frank.
“Was,” I say. “Anyway, when the wing fell apart I had a white feather called Spider that I kept in a matchbox filled with dead leaves.’
“He doesn’t practice anymore?” asks Frank.
“Nope,” I say. “One day I opened the matchbox and the feather was gone, just like that. I cried every day for a week.”
“You should meet my wife,” says Frank. “She does that too. Anthropomorphize.”
*
For some reason, we have a stack of Rorschach test cards lying around the office. I am trying to psychoanalyze myself by keeping them facedown and turning them quickly over to judge my reaction when Frank walks past and laughs.
“Fourteen butterflies and a vagina,” he says. “All you need to know.”
*
I agree to go on a date with my mother’s friend’s broker’s son. I’ve just poked myself in the eye with my mascara brush when my mother calls. She’s spending the evening at That Home with my father. I can hear Sing Your Heart Out in the background.
“Don’t do that thing you do tonight,” says my mother.
“What thing?”
“You know.”
“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”
“And remember to suck in.”
“Bye, Ma.”
“One last thing,” she says. “You! Could! Fall! In! Love! Today!”
*
When I ask the broker’s son what he does, he runs his palms down the shiny front of his shirt and says, “I make money.”
In fact, he’s in real estate. He tells me about a new building complex being built on Randall’s Island. In what sounds like a win for the underdog to me, the mayor has sided with the current residents in a dispute over land rights.
“We’re building the future,” the broker’s son says between mouthfuls of crab cake. “And they want to cling to their rent-stabilized pasts.”
I tell the broker’s son that if I was mayor of New York, I’d implement a policy of public dismemberment for convicted rapists. It would be a penis guillotine built on the Brooklyn Bridge. I originally thought the severed penises would be nailed along the bridge next to their owner’s mug shots, but now I think they should just be thrown to the crowd to be torn apart by angry hands. I’d be willing to guarantee that within a year the rate of violent sex crimes would drop by half, at least.
*
“That,” says my mother the next day, after her friend calls to tell her what happened. “That is the thing that you do.”
*
The couple next to me on the PATH train are both wearing leather jackets that reach their ankles. I wonder what came first, the jackets or the relationship.
“What was up with you this morning?” she says.
“I was just in a good mood,” he says.
“That was you in a good mood?” she says. “It doesn’t suit you at all.”
*
Frank and I are walking back from the falafel place when he asks me how my date went. I try to give him the broad strokes, but it’s too late, I find myself recounting my mayoral plans all over again.
“There’d be posters of me in the subway,” I say. “Wearing a tuxedo and holding a severed penis like a microphone.”
*
I will not say anything stupid for the rest of the day. If that means I do not say anything for the rest of the day, or every day thereafter, so be it.
*
I get an email from Frank. It says:
You could call it the guillo-peen.
*
On my father’s birthday I bring him a book about the birds of New Jersey. I do my best watching him scrabble away at the wrapping paper like he has salad servers for hands, then give up and rip it off myself. I pass him the book; he wraps it around his shoe. Then we sit and watch Sing Your Heart Out until the TV is the only light in the room.
*
My father’s illness is something I used to think was temp, but now I know is perm.
*
Frank and I have started an email chain filled with disturbing things we experience throughout our days. The idea behind it is that if one of us had to live it, the other should too. I guess that’s friendship or something.
Blind woman tripping over the curb.
Baby rat dead on the subway tracks.
A condom, empty but seemingly used, outside Gray’s Papaya.
*
“What are you smiling at?” asks my mother.
“Nothing,” I say. “Email from someone at work.”
“Is it a picture of a cat?” she asks. “The girls from synagogue are always sending me pictures of cats. What the heck do I want to look at cats for?”
“I think that just goes with the territory of being an older woman,” I say.
“Menopause is the only thing that goes with the territory,” she says. “Everything else is just marketing.”
*
Frank wants to open an office in Paris. He’s listening to tapes that will supposedly teach him French in a month. He says a couple of sentences to me that sound pretty good. They mean “Do you like vegetables?” and “Were you pretty as a child?”