When a neighbor left a note on my door alerting me that my grass was reaching unmanageable heights and he would appreciate my maintaining my lawn for the “integrity” of the neighborhood? I called a landscaping service to come once a month and left a check under the porch mat.
The trash presented a more difficult challenge. I couldn’t figure out a way to get it to the curb without actually going outside. It’s not that I couldn’t do that, of course, but now I was determined to not have to. To figure out this last piece of the puzzle. I’m not proud of it, but I called the city garbage service and told them I was disabled. They said if I could get my trash into the bin beside my back door, the workers would come around and get it every Thursday morning. And I felt a little buzz of pride at my deceitful cleverness.
Six months passed. Then a year. And there were times when I would stop and wonder if this was it. If I would live my life out this way, never seeing another soul in person again. But mostly, I just woke up every morning and lived my life like everyone else does—not thinking about the big picture, just doing my work for class, making dinner, watching the news, then getting up and doing it all over again. In that way, I didn’t think I was really different from anyone else.
Though my mother called sporadically over the years, to complain about the weather, a rude waiter, a bad ending to a TV series, to brag about one of the many trips she and Lenny were taking or to invite me for a holiday—even though she knew I wouldn’t come—we never discussed the money she was sending me. I was ashamed of taking it, but I had also convinced myself that I somehow deserved it. That she owed me for being kind of a selfish, crappy mother.
But I never meant for it to go on this long.
“I know you have your condition,” Lenny said, “but it’s something we never quite saw eye t—”
“I understand,” I say, the humiliation burning brighter with each second. But there’s a flare of anger mixed in—anger that my mom didn’t leave me any money on top of the house and car (even as I recognize how ungrateful that is), although I guess technically it’s Lenny’s money. Or maybe I’m angry at myself for becoming so dependent on those monthly checks. Or maybe it has nothing to do with the money. Maybe I’m mad that I didn’t take her up on her invitation to visit even once. Or invite her to visit me. Funny how when someone dies you momentarily forget all their faults, like how just talking to her on the phone was so emotionally draining, I didn’t ever want to see her in person. But now . . . now it’s too late.
“Well, then,” Lenny says.
There’s nothing left for us to say, so I wait for his good-bye. But then it’s silent for so long I wonder if maybe he already hung up and I somehow missed it.
“Lenny?” I say, at the exact moment he speaks.
“Jubilee, your mom really . . . ,” he says. His voice falters again. “Well, you know.”
I don’t know. My mom really what? Liked tight blouses? Smoked far too many cigarettes? Was impossible to live with? I hold on to the phone long after he’s hung up, hoping I’ll hear what he was going to say. That it somehow got caught in the ether between us and will materialize at any second. When I accept that it won’t, I let the receiver drop onto the floor beside me.
Minutes pass. Or maybe hours. But I don’t move—even when a staccato of beeps blares from the receiver, the phone insisting on being hung up.
My mother is dead.
I look around the kitchen, checking for subtle differences—comparing the before and after. If I can find one, then it’s evidence that maybe I’ve entered some alternate universe. That maybe mom is still alive in the other, real one. Or maybe I’ve read 1Q84 too many times.
I take a deep breath, and tears spring to my eyes. I’m not prone to outward displays of emotion, but today I just sit and let them fall.
THERE ARE UPSIDES to being a recluse. Like, it only takes me six minutes to wash the one plate, mug, fork that I use every day. (Yes, I’ve timed it.) And I don’t ever have to make small talk. I don’t have to nod and smile when someone says “Heard it might rain today,” or mumble something inane back like “The grass sure could use it, huh?” Really, I don’t have to worry about the weather, period. It’s raining? Who cares? I’m not going out in it.
But there are downsides, too. Like, late at night when I’m lying in bed listening to the dead-quiet of the street and wondering if maybe, just maybe, I’m the only person left on Earth. Or if there was a civil war or a superflu or a zombie apocalypse and nobody remembered to tell me, because nobody remembers I’m here. On those nights, I would think about my mom. She’d call me. She’d tell me. She’d remember. And a wave of comfort would wash over me.
But now, she’s gone. And I’m lying in bed, listening to the night air and wondering: Who’s going to remember me now?
THURSDAY BEGINS LIKE a normal day: I go downstairs and make two sunny-side-up eggs with toast (cut into tiny bite-size pieces after a choking incident four years ago) and eat it while reading the news online. But then, instead of clicking on the next lecture in my Harvard class (this week: “Shakespeare After All: The Later Plays”), I have to face that this day is not a normal day.
I will be leaving the house.
My heartbeat revs at the thought, so I try to distract myself with a more immediate problem: I have nothing to wear to my mother’s funeral. The only black things I own are a pair of sweatpants and a matching hoodie. Not exactly suitable funeral attire.
Upstairs, I walk down the hall to my mom’s room and stand in the doorway. For nine years, I’ve left her room exactly as it was when she walked out the door. Not in a creepy Miss Havisham kind of way. There’s no uneaten wedding cake on a table or anything. I told myself it’s because I just didn’t know what to do with her stuff, but part of me liked having her stuff where it’s always been. Like maybe she’d come back for it one day.
Except now, I guess, she won’t.