“Miss Scace, my high school gym teacher? That’s not possible, Mother,” I said carefully, as if explaining to a five-year-old. “Miss Scace died years ago.”
“Appearances can be deceptive. She only looks dead.”
You can see why I might have wished to keep my young children at a safe distance from their grandmother. I wanted them to have a normal childhood, unlike mine.
I’ll say a word here about my husband, a lovable individual who has improved with time. I don’t have to tell you that I held him at several arms’ lengths from my mother during what I will quaintly refer to as our courtship period. I imagined him getting one earful of her and hightailing it for the nearest international flight, so alarmed would he have been. But that encounter had needed to take place sometime, since—through some means unknown to me but that may have involved tarot cards—she’d become aware of his existence. The Universe had no objection to him, she’d told me: if anything, he was well aspected, with Jupiter looming large and the Kings of Cups and Diamonds prominent. She was looking forward to meeting him. “No hurry,” she’d say to me, which meant there was.
I softened him up with anecdotes, which I packaged as lighthearted and jokey. The hair burning, the glop in the jars, the pointing, the cards, even my father as a garden gnome—these were harmless eccentricities. No one took them seriously, I said: not my mother, and certainly not me. My husband-to-be said my mother sounded like good fun and doubtless had a sense of humor. “Oh yes,” I laughed, my palms sweating. “Such a sense of humor!”
You’ll notice I said nothing to him about Miss Scace. That slice was truly wacko. I trusted him to be understanding, but not as far as airborne, mushroom-poaching Miss Scace was concerned. Life would be calmer if my mother and my significant other could at least tolerate one another.
Finally they met: tea at the King Edward Hotel in downtown Toronto, arranged by me. I didn’t think my mother would kick up in such a genteel atmosphere, and she didn’t. Nothing untoward happened. My mother was polite, warmish, attentive; my husband-to-be was deferential, attuned, subdued. I did catch her sneaking a look at his hands—she’d want to get a peek at his heart line, to see if he was likely to go off the rails and start fornicating with secretaries—but she was discreet about it. Aside from that, she acted the part of a nice middle-class mother, of an outmoded variety. My husband-to-be was a little disappointed: he’d been led to expect something less orthodox.
My father’s funeral took place during an interval of peace with my mother, so when I spotted her in her black dress and veil, I moved over to sit beside her. I was speaking to her again: speaking to her went in cycles. She would upset me, I would cut her off, I’d relent, there would be peace, then she’d cross the line once more.
“Are you okay?” I asked. She was crying a little, rare for her.
“He was my sweetheart,” she said, dabbing at her eyes. “I drove him away! We were so much in love. Once upon a time.” Mascara was running down her cheeks, and I wiped it away. Since when had she started wearing mascara? More importantly, when had she started crying in public? Was she getting soft?
It was true: she was indeed getting soft, but not in a good way.
Now that I’d been alerted to the possibility, I noted the signs with dismay—they were proliferating with unsettling rapidity, almost as if she were dissolving. The mascara phase was over nearly as soon as it had begun: outer beauty was no longer a concern, she said. Gone were the freshly ironed shirtwaist dresses. In fact, gone was the iron: my mother never ironed anything anymore. Taking the place of the starched dresses and the no-nonsense Cuban-heeled shoes was a succession of outsized T-shirts, not always clean, paired with jogging pants and an array of clumsy, orthopedic-looking sandals. Her gnarled toes poked out the fronts of these sandals, their nails thickened and yellowish. I wondered if she was having trouble cutting them. Worse: I wondered if she was even remembering to cut them.
Was she still grinding things in her mortar? I wasn’t sure. Several jars were growing whiskery mold in her fridge. By now I was conducting twice-weekly fridge inspections, to make sure she didn’t give herself food poisoning from eating fermenting leftovers.
Her pressure cooker was long gone: she said she’d discarded it after Miss Scace had caused it to blow up. Her iron frying pans were rusting. Her pots had been cleaned—not very effectively—and stored away, though I found one in the backyard with three inches of algae-clogged water full of mosquito larvae. “It’s a birdbath,” she said. The backyard itself was a jungle: no more neat borders, no more herbs. The prevailing weed was sow thistle.