“Mom,” he said, “what year is it?”
“2012.”
“And who’s the president?”
“Barack Obama.” She practically beamed, saying his name. She loved Obama. Even when Hillary Clinton had been running in 2008, she had supported Obama. His mother despised Hillary Clinton, something he always assumed had to do with the Clinton marriage.
“Mom—will you draw a clock for me?”
She gave him a withering look, but she did it, and her clock was fine, more than fine. His mother drew beautifully.
“I’m not losing my mind, Gerald.”
“It’s just that—”
“Do we have dessert?”
“You haven’t touched your dinner.”
“Gerry, I’m seventy-six years old. If I want to eat some ice cream, I’m going to eat some darn ice cream.”
He laughed. She had a point. And her joke dispelled most of his worries. His mother wasn’t losing her mind. She was just making up a story that made her feel better, that restored the self-respect taken from her long ago.
His first novel, meant to be a tribute to her, an explanation of how a beautiful, intelligent woman could end up with such an inferior, unworthy man, had hurt her terribly. “It wasn’t like that, Gerry,” she had said. It was the worst fight of their relationship, the only quarrel they had after his teen years. He tried to remind her it was fiction, and it was, but he always thought the problem was that he had gotten too much right. He wanted to say, I can do math, Mother. He had been born six months after his parents’ marriage. He had killed her, in the book, killed himself, to spare her the pain that followed. It was the inverse of the Sharon Olds poem. He was willing not to exist if that was what it took to spare his mother.
Would your mother have been better off dead? An interviewer had tried to shock him with that question at a literary festival in 2010.
“It’s fiction,” Gerry had said. “It’s not autobiography. I can’t help it if people conflate the two, but it’s not a line of inquiry that interests me.”
He went to the kitchen and fixed his mother her favorite, Baskin-Robbins Jamoca Almond Fudge. The 31 Flavors they frequented had been in the little strip center that housed Morgan Millard, but now you could buy it at the grocery store anytime you wanted it. Why did that make him sad?
Maybe he was just at an age where everything made him sad, even the reelection of the best president of his adult life. Of his entire life: he had little affection for Kennedy. He didn’t agree with Obama on everything, of course. And Carter, go figure, was clearly the best person to hold the office. Too good. When a saint becomes president, it’s discomfiting. One expects a president to make a few more deals with the devil, spend less time on the White House tennis court schedule.
He opened the fridge, thinking to add Reddi-wip to the ice cream, and was surprised to see one of his mother’s bras lying on a shelf, carefully folded. It appeared to be a newer bra, brighter and bolder than the lingerie he remembered trying to avoid in the laundry room when he was a boy.
His mother was watching the returns dreamily when he brought her the dish of ice cream.
“Mom, you left your”—the word bra was impossible for him—“your, um, undergarments in the fridge.”
“They’re calling Illinois,” she said. “Your father lives there.”
“Ohio, Mom,” he said. “He lived in Ohio.”
“Yes, years ago. He lives in Illinois now. Lake Forest. He’s a sexton.”
He was impressed, in spite of himself, with his mother’s talent for detail in her fantasies. A sexton—one could imagine a novel with such a character. Not a Gerry Andersen novel, but maybe one by Anne Tyler. But then, that’s how his mother had survived her life, by telling stories. She conjured up fictions to comfort herself. Meanwhile, his father was a pathological liar. What choice did Gerry have but to become a novelist?
He risked the word. “The bra, Mom?”
“Oh. I read somewhere they last longer that way. If you keep them in a cold place.”
February 15
GERRY ANGLES HIMSELF so he is more on his side than his back and taps on his laptop, using only his left hand. It’s awkward, but it’s less painful than trying to sit on his bruised coccyx. There is almost no position in which he doesn’t feel pain or discomfort. It’s an alien sensation to him, this chronic throbbing. He had never considered his pride in his health hubristic. He took care of himself. He walked, he didn’t overeat, he seldom drank. Everything else was a genetic lottery—or so he had been modest enough to say when complimented on his youthful appearance, his full head of hair. Like most lottery winners, he secretly credited himself with his luck.