“You didn’t have to do this,” I said. “I’m here. I moved back.”
For you, was what I managed not to say, for you I moved back. Italicized subtitles scripted themselves along the bottom of the movie screen in my mind. Who was she, this woman? What kind of person closed down her entire life in a single week and moved herself into this place with no help, no advice, no warning? Who did this kind of thing? The couch was behind me and I sank down onto it.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.
My voice in the air between us was like wire, like the tattooed wire that wound itself up my arm and, invisible unless I was naked, around my back and down my other arm, so that when my arms were tight at my sides, I was bound around with wire. So that something was holding me at all times. Something that would not let me fall apart, no matter how bad things got.
“I’m your daughter,” I said.
Something flickered in her eyes. “I know that.”
“Then why would you do this? It was my house too!” Exclamation mark. Boldface. The words boldface exclamation mark began scrolling along the bottom of my mind in tiny typeface. Boldface exclamation mark! Boldface exclamation mark! Boldface exclamation mark! I mentally batted them away. But angry words spilled out anyway.
“Ma, it didn’t have to be this way!”
“Clara.”
Something in her voice. Something that made the exclamation marks stop. Something that made me look up at her instead of at the floor, where I was tracing the outline of the fake Persian rug with my eyes. Up one side, down the next, up one side, down the next. Rectangle rectangle rectangle.
“WHAT.”
“Clara.”
“You never listen to me. You never did listen to me.” My voice kept coming out in italics and boldface and exclamation marks and I was helpless against it; it had taken on a life of its own and it would have its say.
“I always listened to you,” she said.
“You did NOT. You wrecked things for me, Ma. You were the reason Asa broke up with me. Admit it. Admit it!”
She came toward me then. The boxer advanced from her corner, faded flower dangling from her hand, Keds silent on the floor the way she was always silent on the floor. She stood before me, my mother, my only mother, and she looked at me the way a person looks at another person when she knows there is little time left and she has little left to lose.
“Why do you say that?”
Because it’s true. Because I looked through the window and saw the two of you talking that night. I saw how upset he was. And you wouldn’t talk, and he wouldn’t talk, and next day he broke up with me and then he was gone and it was your fault. It was your fault.
It had to have been her fault. And if it wasn’t, then why did she have no explanation for me? Why had she just turned her head away? Asa wouldn’t tell me what she said and she wouldn’t tell me what she said and then boom, Asa broke up with me, and boom, Asa enlisted in the army, and boom, she forced me out of state for college, and boom, a whole bunch of years went by until boom, here we were. This was where we found ourselves. With her having just sold off, given away or packed up our entire lives and moved herself into a nursing home with the money she got from selling the house. Ma, this can’t be happening. Ma, this can’t have happened. Ma, please can we go back in time, please can we do it over, please, please?
But time was what we had run out of, and it happened so fast.
We went so wrong.
That was the sentence in my head, a snake slithering after its own tail. I pushed aside the memory of a night back then, an awful night that still lived in my mind, a night when I had screamed and screamed at her, said awful things, a night neither of us had spoken of since. Not then, and not now. She stood there waiting, waiting for an answer, an answer that never came, and she did not back down. I had to give her that. The senior boxer held her ground, her only weapons a faded flower and an unblinking gaze filled with, what? Entreaty. That was the word. Entreaty.
She was exactly as tall as me. How was it possible I had not noticed that before?
* * *
In the wake of that asked and unanswered nonconversation, the boxers retreated to their separate corners of the ring. Unbloodied and unbeaten on the outside, but on the inside, a different matter. Their scars were invisible but crippling.
Difficult Mothers for $400, please. Difficult Daughters for $600. If this were a real-life Jeopardy! game we would be the Daily Double.
Jeopardy! was the only ritual left now out of everything I had planned. The others I had thought up as I clutched the steering wheel and sped north—walking our woods, cleaning and organizing our house, stacking wood for the winter—were no longer possible. Even making dinner for my mother, that most modest of goals, was not possible, because there was no kitchen in my mother’s room. No cupboard in which to arrange the cans and bottles she liked to eat from with a cocktail fork. No cocktail fork.
I ate dinner with my mother in the communal dining room at the place where she lived now—which was how I thought of it, instead of the memory care wing of a care facility/nursing home—exactly once. Mashed potatoes and pork roast and applesauce. She ate that dinner with a spoon and a knife and a fork, a regular-size fork. The sight of my mother sitting in a regular chair and eating from a regular plate with regular utensils and a paper napkin in her lap smote my heart. No. Not this, not for my mother, the Fearsome Tamar, who all my life had leaned against the counter with an opened can or jar, plucking out olives or marinated artichoke hearts or other bits of food one by one.
So: Jeopardy! A television game show was what we had left.
When I visited, we usually sat in the community room down the hall from her bedroom, watching. I arrived in plenty of time, many minutes before the show began at 7:30 p.m., because Tamar hated to be late. All her life she had hated to be late, but of late, her lateness hatred had intensified. On one such visit the television was already on, muttering low, a cooking show in which the contestants were given baskets of unknown ingredients from which to prepare a feast.
“That’s not the right ______” my mother said, and turned to me.
______ was what the look on her face meant, which was Help me, I can’t find the right word. It’s here, it’s near, it’s just out of reach.
“Channel,” I said. I took the remote from the coffee table and clicked. “Here we go.”
Jeopardy! was the most-watched television game show in history and Alex Trebek was its longest-running and most intimidating host. Contestants often seemed to cower before him. That night, a tax accountant was in the lead. He kept pressing the buzzer first, in an annoyingly fast and tense way, beating the other two contestants.
“Baseball for two hundred, please,” he said.
Sometimes known as the white Josh Gibson was the clue.