THE CLOCK TEST by Francesca Mari
“Where’re you calling from!” Nonie squawks. Not hi, not how are you, but “Where’re you calling from!” I tell her I’m calling from Boston – “You’re still all the way there!” – but that the phone call is free. It isn’t, not exactly, but I’m just trying to stop the conversation from firing past me: “How’s your love life. Everything else OK? Good. Well.” “But wait –” I say. “Listen, thanks for calling!” she says, “I love you!” and then I hear her beige rotary phone slam into the receiver. “Nonie?” Dial tone. My dad says she is a child of the Depression. She doesn’t want to cost me a fifty-cent phone call.
After hanging up, I imagine how she scoots her squat body off the stepladder next to her phone and, chugging out a breathless “oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” huffs her way over to the living room, where, positioning herself directly in front of the television, she surrenders herself to gravity and topples backwards into the orange afghan that webs the chesterfield. She never looks anything but alert because her helmet of white curls is so white and so full and so hard. Her glasses are like two big magnifiers, behind which she blinks through episodes of Jeopardy. She pulls the wooden lever of her recliner to prop up her hard calves, then lets another episode of Wheel of Fortune spin and tick past. When she tires of television, she makes her way to the dining room table – directly behind the chesterfield, in the line of vision of that same TV – and takes a seat in one of the wooden chairs with the brass wheels on the bottom. She picks up the old, brown playing cards, curled like dried petals from the imprint of her thumb, and deals herself a hand of solitaire.
Out her dining room window, Nonie can see the other wing of her yellow paneled apartments, the building her husband and father built just after she was married, and she can see the glass patio door of apartment 3g, where Mary lives. Seven years ago, at Nonie’s senior citizen club, Mary Ostert of the crispy caramel hair, started sobbing tears onto both her bingo card and her coffee cake. She’d been given thirty days notice by her landlord in the Marina. Nonie took pity and had an idea. Nonie would rent Mary one of her apartments at a quarter of the market value if Mary, seventy, would help Nonie, seventy-five, clean the building come Saturdays. The agreement was this: Nonie, using her foam kneeling pad, would dust the baseboards and the plastic plants in the lobby, and vacuum the blue speckled commercial carpet (which she picked after long admiring something similar in the movie theater down the street); Mary would water the garden, and run a wet rag over the wooden fire escape steps, painted high-gloss brown.
It seems surprising that Mary even pitched in twice. A few years later, Mary’s daughter moved in with Mary; then her daughter’s husband. All fine. But more people meant more water, more garbage, more gas; meant Depression-era Nonie thought it was only fair that the Osterts pay a hundred bucks more, which they did.
Or which they did until around five years ago, when someone familiar with the San Francisco Tenants Rights told them they didn’t have to. It was actually against the law to charge extra for extra people. My dad tried to explain this to Nonie, but by this time her mind was too riddled with Alzheimer’s to get it. She was furious. Mary and her family, she felt, were taking advantage of her. That Mary, she doesn’t clean a damn thing! When an expensive enlarger lens disappeared from the apartment cellar around the same time, things got worse. Nonie decided Mary’s son-in-law had stolen her lens. There’s no proof, we’ll never know what happened to that lens, but Nonie’s fixated on the Osterts ever since. They are the thieves who have stolen everything that’s ever gone missing.
So Nonie turns to the right, sees that apartment and, hitting her curled hand against the windowsill, starts cursing – to me and my dad, if we’re around, but most of the time just to herself: Oh Madonna Santa. Oh God. She makes me so mad, so mad. She’s stealing my barbecue right in front of my nose! That witch. I’d like to kick their behinds for them. I’m watching her and thinking, what is she doing with the barbecue in the house? She was stealing it! I’m sitting at the window, and they’re stealing! When her anger peaks, she searches for a piece of paper, any scrap of paper, the backside of a piece of junk mail or a torn envelope, and starts writing:
Mary, Noreen + Larry,
I’m still waiting for the return of my B.B., lens & plant. I’ll give you TWO more days to return them. Then I’m going to have you all arrested for stealing.
Lena
P.S. Please move out of my apt. –
She sincerely intends to deliver the note, and does manage to deliver some, but luckily, she more often forgets about having written them first.
Over the past three years, I’ve collected dozens of them, and there are undoubtedly many, many more.
* * *
“We want you to draw a clock that reads 2:30,” I tell Nonie. She is seated at her octagonal dining room table, and I am standing beside her.
“Huh?” Nonie says, drawing up one side of her lip and twisting her head, wringing the skin around her neck as she looks up at my dad.
“A clock, we want you to draw a clock that says 2:30,” Dad repeats loudly. He picks the pen up from the table, puts it in her hands, and taps the sheet of white paper in front of her.
Dad and I just read about “The Clock Test” in the New England Journal of Medicine. Since Alzheimer’s erodes a patient’s visuospatial ability, having a patient draw a clock is a simple way of gauging the severity of the patient’s affliction. The crazier the clock, the later the stage.
I’m positive she’ll get the clock mostly correct. She’ll put the minute hand on the six, but she’ll forget to put the hour hand between the two and the three. That bit’s tricky. I wouldn’t get it, and I don’t think Nonie will either. We’ll see, Dad says. I don’t know.
Nonie begins drawing a lopsided circle. She starts with the one in the right place, but where there should be a four, there is a six, and where there should be an eight, there is a twelve. She pauses after the twelve, eyeing the unnumbered space in the upper left quadrant, and then hunches over the clock and continues numbering until, at twenty, she is out of space.
“There are twenty-four hours in a day,” Dad says, leaning over her shoulder.
I try to stop him. “Shh, just let her do –“
But he can’t help himself. “Ma, there are only twelve numbers on a clock.”
“Here, Nonie. Nonie,” I am bending beside her, trying to get her attention. “Try it again.” I glare at Dad.
She swivels around in her chair and without getting up, grabs a plate from her china cabinet.
“Ma, I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” Dad says.
“I can’t draw circles!” she says.
She traces the plate, and begins filling in the numbers. There is a little space in the upper left, and the eleven is where the ten should be, but other than that they are pretty close.
“What time did you say again?”
“Two-thirty,” Dad says.
“Two-thirty,” she repeats, looking at her clock. “Two . . . thirty. Two –” she says, putting a little tick mark next to the two. “Thirty. Three . . . O!” She ticks the three, and then, not seeing a zero, adds one in the space to the upper left. “Two-thirty!” she says, and puts down the pen.
“There are no zeros on a clock,” Dad says. “You don’t see any zeros.”
“Just let her do it,” I say. “Shhh.”
“You know what a clock looks like,” Dad says, desperately. “Just draw a clock.”
“What do you make me do this for!” Nonie says, stitching her eyebrows and shaking her head. “I know how to tell time!”
Her third attempt is similar to her second, but this time, after putting a tick mark by the two and the three, she adds a zero to the right side, just before the one.
She looks down at her clock and screws out her lips. “Two-thirty!” she says, scribbling “2:30” in the center. “There!” She shoves the paper aside with the back of her hand. “I know how to tell time!”
There are digital clocks all over Nonie’s house, and they are all off. One reads 6:03, another reads 4:15. The TV Guide Channel tells me it’s 4:45.
I extend my arm out towards her and, pointing at the face of my wristwatch, ask the time.
“3:45,” she answers.
I haven’t adjusted for Daylight Savings. She’s exactly right.
* * *
Time hit me hard at the beginning of my sophomore year. The hours raced by too quickly. All of the sudden I would look at the clock and see that it was four in the morning; I’d read forty pages in the past six hours. I became convinced that I wasn’t reading right, that I didn’t really know how to read. I started asking my friends what their eyes did with the words they saw on the page. Did they say the words out loud in their head? Did they see a word as a unit or a combination of letters? Well, I’ve never really thought about it, they’d say, lemme see. I’m always thinking about it, I’d think, scrutinizing their eyes as they scanned across a line. Well, I don’t know, they’d say finally. I just read.
What interest I had in photography became a snapshot obsession. Whenever I was with friends, I began to compulsively snap, certain that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t remember anything after. And what was the point of having fun if you couldn’t remember it? What was the point, even, of not having fun?
I decided I had an attention problem, maybe ADD. But the speed with which the psychiatrist confirmed my suspicions, handing me a prescription at the end of my first visit, convinced me I was being suckered. Instead, I started setting my alarm for six in the morning. Most days, I didn’t hear the beeping, slept right through it, and was lucky if my roommate woke me up.
But on the days I did hear the beeping, I saw the sky illuminate. My room had a single, twelve-paned, northeastward-facing window. The light streamed through the panes, and then sieved through my loose, light blue cotton curtains before hitting the adjacent wall. On the wall, the window was translated into a rhombus composed of twelve smaller rhombuses. The light itself was beautiful, a warm sort of white. But the shapes of the spotlights, creeping ever so slowly in an upwards slant, were striated and skeletal. The folds of the curtains banded the shapes with vertical shadows. The little rhombuses looked like they were decaying or, maybe really, petrifying – like the porous bark of a long-fallen tree. I became fixated on these patterns, on their ephemerality. One morning I grabbed a red oil pencil from my desk, one that I used to mark negatives, and began furiously tracing their perimeters, drawing narrow cells directly onto the wall. I wanted to fix the light there. But by the time I finished the twelfth dapple, the first panes I had traced were off. The sun had been rising, and the first panes – most of the left side – had skitted out of their red frames like snails leaving their shell. They left behind them only the hollows of scurvy red outlines.
The light had shifted. The light had won.
* * *
My Dad’s Last Will and Testament was centered on my pillow again. The whole thing, printed in 20-pt Times New Roman, is five pages long. Stapled on top, the title page is surreal, mostly because of its distinct gothic computer font – a font presumably chosen for its gravity.
The last two times I found his will lying on my pillow, he said he just wanted me to look it over and check for any errors, but this third time was one too many. When I went upstairs to try to hand it back along with some sort of sarcastic joke, I found him in his fake Eames chair, legs propped up like Nonie’s, holding Harvard Men’s Health out in front of his face. “How many health journals do you subscribe to?” I asked. He paused for a moment, counting them out on his fingers, and then answered. “Five. But they’re all different.” He used to read car magazines and watch blockbusters like The Fugitive or Terminator II. Now, if it isn’t a health journal, it’s a health almanac, and if he isn’t reading a health almanac, he’s watching his new favorite television show: Six Feet Under.
I held the Will out to him.
“Oh,” he said, scratching his leg over his black Adidas shorts and lifting his eyebrows to look over his reading glasses at me, “I want you to look over it.”
“But I did – twice.”
“Well, I think it may have changed,” he said and shifted his eyes back to the journal.
So I read it again. But the five pages were just the same. “Should any person, whether a beneficiary under this Will or not mentioned herein, contest this Will or object to any of its provisions, including the above bequest, then to such person or persons, I hereby give and bequeath the sum of One Dollar ($1.00), and no more.” The only line that seems to say anything is the first: “Article I: I am a widowed man. I have one child, FRANCESCA MARI, born August 21, 1985.” All the legalese in the five pages between that first article and the sixth is just to say he leaves everything to me – at least that’s how he translated it for me.
* * *
I never really felt alone until after I wasn’t.
This is how Jacob Stein got me: he told me he got a C- in a class called Magic of Numbers. He said he wrote letters to The Crimson from the perspective of an eighty-year-old woman and a surly 16-year-old boy. He wrote the innards of greeting cards for Blue Mountain – From a Loving Daughter. He didn’t give a fuck about school. He smiled. His eyes were huge and never veered far from my face. He looked young, innocent, self-assured, and nice.
The first night Jacob slept over, I woke at six, before my cell phone and two alarms had the chance to compete with one another. I took a long shower, then slid back into bed, my blood skittering through my body, so excited. I read until eight, deciding eight was a perfectly reasonable hour to run my fingers down the smooth skin on his funny squash-hardened arm. He turned on his back, then sleepily lifted his head and smiled. His teeth were crusted brown. I jerked back. They looked like beans. His eyes were closed as he puckered his lips to kiss me. I arched over him to peck his cheek instead. His head flopped back onto the pillow. I climbed over him, and out of bed. I packed my bag and left him to sleep.
I missed him almost immediately. We got ice cream the next night – ice cream! – staring at each other like idiots. We walked around residential Cambridge, stopping to poke through the cardboard boxes of free books, and then we lay about in the middle of a spring baseball field with only splotches of grass amidst the dirt; he rubbed his hands all over my face like a kid fingering the profile of an action figure. He told me he was a writer. He had taken off a semester to write stories, most of which turned out to be horror. He had sent over fifty envelopes full of them to various literary and genre magazines, and the rejection letters were still trickling into his mailbox. The strength of that stole my breath.
I skipped a Friday night library shift to go with him to my friend David Wax’s concert at The Advocate, and when confronted by bean mouth again, this time at nine the next morning, I squirmed. I pointed to his mouth. He touched his gums, looked at his fingers, and told me while cracking his knuckles that he had a nervous habit of grinding his teeth and gnawing on his tongue in the night. The beans had been blood.
In the year and a half after that the beans never came back, but I saw that he was nervous in all sorts of ways. I became anxious that I wasn’t nervous enough.
We fell into a routine: bed at midnight, up at eight. I worked all day on irrelevant academic essays – the verbal versus the visual in Doctor Faustus; the modern problem of the signature – then dumped what little there was of me into him at night. And so the days of my junior year blurred by, indistinguishable, like the stakes of a picket fence seen through a bus window. But there was this wide-eyed, extremely affectionate boy sitting beside me, kissing my cheekbones, telling me stories, and when I said a word, he sort of knew what it meant. When I said Dad, he would stroke my hair and tell me I was nice even though Jacob knew when my dad called I spent the whole two-minute conversation wondering how I’d get off. And when Jacob said Dad, I told him he didn’t have to worry; he was brilliant in a completely fresh way, and his father was doing something different.
But for all the definitions we learned, there were a couple words we maybe shouldn’t have defined, that I maybe made him over-define until the sub-definitions we gave to them couldn’t possibly be compatible, until I’d ruined the words through reduction. To me, love meant believing me capable of things I didn’t quite believe myself. To Jacob, love meant kissing in public, love meant sex.
We moved to Charleston, South Carolina, for the summer so that I could write an ill-conceived creative nonfiction thesis. He would finish the book he had sold earlier that winter. In the sweltering heat, amidst the Spanish moss, I was overwhelmed by time and my inability to make use of it. I was confused by this boy who said he would never have a crush on anyone because crushes on people who didn’t like you were a waste of time. He was overwhelmed, I found out later, by me.
For some structure and some life experience, we decided to apply to work at one of the praline shops that cast sugar spells on the tourists waddling about the old slave mall. I was painfully shy and asked him if I could practice my handshake.
“I’ll get the job,” he said to me smiling, “but you won’t even get an interview.”
I told him he was arrogant, an egomaniac. “It’s true,” he said. And somehow, some way, something had happened while we were dating – I was cowed by him – and I realized he was right.
In bed a few days later, his arm crooked around me, we played our game. I fed him three nouns, and he would spin a story – funny, with a beginning, middle and end. All I could do was lie there in awe, awash in the amazement that he loved me, or at least lived with me.
“Now you try,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“Just try anything.”
“I – I can’t.”
I put my leg between his the way we liked it.
“What do you love about me?” I said.
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I can show you,” he stated, pleased with what had popped into his head. “Your cheekbones,” he said, pawing them. “Your jaw. . . . We have strong jaws. . . . Your eyes . . . They’re like mine. . . .Your hipbones,” he said stubbing his fingers across them. “You have nice hipbones.”
I unstuck my leg from between his, and turned on my side away from him. A couple days later, Jacob got a call from the candy store. Needless to say, I didn’t.
When he broke up with me only a month or two later, I lost the ease of our routine and the ease of our lexicon. But scariest to me, most alienating, was that I lost my only witness to a year and a half worth of time. He would sprint on ahead with his life, I knew, and I would stay stuck, tending to the memories.
* * *
I hear the rumble of the garage and the opening and closing of car doors.
“Fra-ank, do you have my suitcase?” I hear Nonie squawking, and all of the sudden I realize Nonie is here to stay for the weekend, meaning it must be Christmas Eve. I’ve already been home for five days. Five.
After reheating and eating Stouffer’s lasagna from the Family Size tin tray, we are all still at the kitchen table. I am checking my email, pirating my neighbor’s wireless; my dad is sifting through bills; and Nonie is sitting there staring off at the fancy goldfish with the brainy heads and the long tissuey tails.
“Here,” Dad says, handing her a review I wrote of Jonathan Franzen. “Francesca wrote this.”
She stumbles through the first two sentences and then puts it down. “I’m not interested,” she says.
Dad laughs. I’m relieved.
She turns to me. “If it was about you, it’d be different. But I don’t know him,” she says, stubbing her index finger into Franzen’s nose in the magazine.
She shakes her wrist, trying to get the face of her gold watch to where she can see it. The watch is over sixty-five years old, a souvenir from her honeymoon to Switzerland, and the delicately woven gold band, duct-taped together at the moment, is always breaking.
“Ever since he fixed the strap, my watch has been broke!” Nonie says. He, the jeweler, the nebulous jeweler who nobody knows, is Nonie’s version of the boogieman. “The man’s a crook! What time is it?”
“The time is right,” my dad says.
“It’s broke!”
“You’re broke. It’s keeping time. It’s 9:15.”
“Ooh,” Nonie says, craning her neck to look at the clock on the kitchen wall beside her. “Ooh, I thought it was 10:15.”
Nonie lets her draping lids fall over her eyes and fingers the wedding ring from her second husband, hooking and unhooking the clasp that’s been added to it so that it will fit over her thick knuckle. She’s about to doze off, but then her eyes pop open.
“They stole my carpet!” she says, hitting the table. “It used to be there and it’s not there no more. They took my good one and put a piece of junk there.”
My dad laughs, and looks at me: Now you see what I have to listen to every week, he is saying with his eyes. Then he looks at Nonie and says, “You bought that carpet THIRTY years ago.”
Nonie turns on him. “Don’t you think I know what I bought!”
“I’m just an ig-nor-ant soul,” my dad says, rolling his eyes and shaking his head over his bills.
“You don’t know nothing either,” she snaps. “That’s all we got is thieves around here.”
“Yep, your tenants,” my dad says under his breath, more to me, I assume, than her. “You picked ’em.”
When Nonie goes downstairs to wrap her head of curls in toilet paper to protect them from the pillow, I find my dad in his chair, reading The U.C. Berkeley Medical Journal with the TV blaring.
Picking me up from the airport for Thanksgiving, my dad asked about Jacob, and I told him we had broken up. When he asked what had happened, and I said, “I don’t know,” and when he asked again, and I said “Not sure!” he started telling me about his ex-girlfriends. No more questions, just stories of Renee, the strawberry blonde who stuttered, and Miss San Francisco, the beauty queen who fell for another guy. We had never talked about these sorts of things before. “Don’t you hate it when they tell you, I have to talk to you or, even worse, We need to talk?” He shook his head with a hazy smile.
I take a step towards him. He turns the page of his journal.
“Want to hear something crazy?” I start.
“Huh,” my dad says, not looking up.
“My first college boyfriend is going to be on a reality TV show,” I say. “Beauty and the Geek.” I pause. No response. “He’s one of the geeks.”
“Oh,” my dad says, unenthused. “Who.”
“Nate. Nate Dern,” I say, trying to laugh.
“Never heard of him.” The TV is reflecting off his white undershirt.
“Well, I know, I never told –“
“How’s Jacob?”
I see Jacob’s smile, want to be the cause of it. And then I see it as I saw it last, directed at the sophomore with the upturned nose and the Nebraska-blue eyes.
“Good,” I say running my right hand back and forth across the brass ridges of the doorknob.
“What’s he doing for Christmas?” Dad says, taking off his glasses and looking up at me.
“I don’t know,” I say turning the knob to leave.
“You don’t know?”
“He’s Jewish.”
* * *
“Where’re you calling from!”
“Boston, but it doesn’t cost me anything.” I say from the library stairwell, back in Cambridge where I’m sitting, my legs hugged close to me, on the cold, concrete steps.
“Wha-at?” she says.
“It doesn’t cost me anything,” I say as loud as I can without shouting. A couple girls in sweats and Lacoste sweaters turn to stare as they continue up the stairs.
“Oh,” Nonie says. “It’s good to hear your voice.”
“What’s new?” I ask, trying to sound perky.
“Nothing!” she bursts. “Same old thing! It’s always the same old thing.”
I know what that thing is, so I don’t ask any more questions. I don’t want to get her started.
“How’s your love life?” she asks. “You’re not still seeing Stein?”
I’m surprised she remembers. Shocked, in fact. “No,” I say. “We broke up.”
“What’d you do?” she says.
“I don’t know.”
“You let him slip through your fingers, that’s what you did.”
I’ve been telling myself the same thing for months.
“Did he find someone better?” she asks.
I’m thinking of Nebraska-blue, her gummy laugh in the red glow of the Staples sign, where I saw them the other night, right before he put his hand around her waist and kissed her. My own grandmother saw it coming, my own grandmother doesn’t even have to ask who dumped who.
Then she catches herself.
“Did you drop him or did he drop you?” she says.
“He dropped me.” I try to sound matter of fact, but having to admit it is worse.
“He’s probably concentrating on his studies,” she says.
“That’s what he told me,” I say skeptically. The sound of my voice scares me. I sound jaded, bitter.
That cynicism is the real reason he dumped me. And not a month later, a couple acquaintances floated out before me the rumor that a skinny sophomore had passed him a note in seminar: Want to have a 24-hour affair? It couldn’t possibly be true, they said looking at me inquisitively, as I tried to smile back, knowing that it must be. Jacob told all sorts of tall tales, but only ones that made him look worse.
It’s just sex, I told myself. And then I found out she was a writer, and a good one too. I imagined them lying in bed, his left arm crooked around her shoulder, lying just the way we used to lie, talking just the way we used to talk. Only everything about her was better. Two of my friends showed me a picture of her posing in her underwear for the school paper. See, she’s a slut, they said. Sexually liberated, I thought. Carefree, confident.
“I can still see him eating that – remember that piece of meat?” Nonie is asking. “What was it? Do you remember? Turkey or chicken or – ?”
Chicken, it was chicken from Le Felce’s. She kept putting more on his plate, probably more out of an Italian instinct than because of her Alzheimer’s, and not knowing what else to do, it being his first time meeting her, he kept smiling and eating it. Have some more, she kept saying. Have some more.
“Do you remember?”
“Chicken,” I say.
“I liked him,” she says.
“So did I,” I say.
“Oh, you got a whole world ahead of you,” she says. “My world is finished . . . Finished, finished, finito!” There is a muffled noise and then a clank. It sounds like she’s dropped the phone. There is some more muffling and then “Oh Madonna Santa! Oh Madonna Santa!” becomes clear through the receiver. “I can’t snap my fingers no more!” she says. “Oh, I’m ready to go.”
* * *
Dad manages Nonie’s apartment building and takes care of all of her finances. He tells me about how she’s getting worse, how she’s started to call him at his work every twenty minutes. “Those son of a beehives, I saw them go in the bedroom with my barbeque!” “Look, Ma,” he says, “I’m going to have to call you back.” “Fra-ank, are you listening to me?”
Then, $50,000 simply disappeared from her checking account. “Fifty thousand dollars can’t just disappear into thin air!” my dad said. “Where’d it go?” “I don’t know!” she snapped. “What’d you do with it?” “I didn’t do nothing!” It took a whole morning of listening to Muzak on hold with the bank for my dad to find out she had transferred the funds herself, having opened a CD a day earlier. “What are we going to do?” my dad says to me. “She refuses to move out of her apartment. She refuses help but she can’t live alone there anymore.” He pauses. “She’s getting worse.” “Mail me some notes,” I say.
Mary + Noreen,
I’m so angry with you people. Why did you steal my B.B., plant, saw, hammer and my son’s lens to his projector? Please return my things or I’m going to have you arrested. I gave you enough time. Now I’m going to take action. I’ll give you 3 more days to return my things, then I’m going to have you arrested for stealing.
Lena
P.S. Please move from my apt
P.S. If Noreen parks in the garage again I will have her car towed away my tenant was very angry.
P.S. Please try and obey my rules.
Please try to obey my rules. Her request is so raw, so desperate, I can’t stand the thought of the reaction Mary and Noreen would have – do have – on the occasion that one of Nonie’s notes actually makes it past the kitchen counter, on one of the occasions when Nonie actually ventures down the backsteps, sideways and one at a time while clutching the rail, and then steps across her garden to rap on 3g’s bedroom window. I want to protect Nonie from the mix of laughter and irritation with which Mary and her daughter would read Nonie’s request and then show it to any and all of their friends.
Then one day, centered above the floral placemat on Nonie’s kitchen table, I see a little square neatly ripped from the San Francisco Chronicle: Mary Ostert’s obituary.
“Mary’s dead?” I ask.
Nonie shrugs.
“Dad, check this out,” I say. “Mary’s dead. Did you know that? Did Nonie say anything?”
“What?”
“Look, the obituary is lying on the table.”
We look again at the square and then at one another, smiling at the absurdity of it all, our eyes a mix of amusement, curiosity, and concern. In the presence of Nonie, our eyes sometimes lock like this.
“When did this happen?” Dad says.
“I don’t know,” Nonie says.
“Mary’s dead?” I say. “I can’t believe you didn’t say anything.”
“She’s dead, that’s all,” Nonie says. “What do you expect?”
* * *
The 90th birthday party was my idea, and my mother’s sister did all the work. She suggested my dad gather some old photos of Nonie to make a poster. I called him every day for a few weeks to nag him to do it, and finally he did: “Happy Birthday! From Your Loving Son.”
I take a few days off work and fly into San Francisco the night before the party. We arrive at my aunt’s an hour late, neither my father nor I having actually looked at the noon start time on the invitation. The yellow ranch house is filled with hefty Italians, Nonie’s cousins and middle-aged nieces and nephews and their tweens and teenagers, wading about the house in search of food or seating, saying hi! to one another, saying, The last time I saw you, you . . . One or two clasp Nonie’s shoulders when we walk in, and a couple give her Big Italian Kisses, but most don’t rise from where they’ve settled around the outdoor tables. The only open seats are at the outskirts, chair legs precariously tooth-picked into the oregano bush, which is swarming with bees. I lead Nonie to one of those seats, thinking people will gather around her, but they don’t seem to take notice. They continue their conversations – Mendocino? Woowhee. How long’d that take? With traffic? – so I assume the seat beside her myself. I leave her side only to fetch wine for her and to try to cajole Dad into keeping her company with me – It’s important, I say, this is her ninetieth birthday – but he tells me he must take care of the raviolis. Every time I go in to get him, he tells me the same ravioli story, and every time he is standing slightly behind his girlfriend, smiling and administering some pleasantry about our house, or our commute, or the hacking air which the wildfires have smoked up.
“So what’s new with you?” I say to Nonie after five minutes of silence in the sun.
“How’s your love life!” Nonie says.
“Not so good.”
“You’re not still seeing Stein?”
“No.”
“Things didn’t work out?”
“No.”
“That’s okay.”
After blowing out fifty or so dripping candles in two big poofs, Nonie cuts the massive sheet of strawberry shortcake and opens presents. Nonie’s seventy-year-old niece, Diane, narrates, Oohing and Aahing and laughing while lifting up the gift (a peacock feather duster or a lacey pink robe) for all to see.
Nonie gets confused by the cards, which she reads aloud, word by halting word, but when she finishes the reading, Nonie makes sure to ask who gave her each gift and smiles and thanks the giver, truly touched.
When people called Dad in the weeks prior asking what to get Nonie, he suggested either clothing, a girdle, or bath stuff. In the months before her birthday she had become incontinent but denied it. She would wet a seat and then refuse to change – either because all that bending was too enervating or because not changing meant not having to admit defeat. Her 30-year-old girdles stunk, and she refused to get new ones because she didn’t see the point. This was Dad’s canny solution, and Nonie received bath oils and lotions and soaps in rose, lavender, and chamomile, body sprays in raspberry and vanilla. “Boy, you people must think I stink!” Nonie says, joking, but also, later in the car on her way home, angrily, furiously, “What, do you people think – I stink?”
* * *
“Where are you calling from?” she says a week after her birthday.
“D.C., but, don’t worry, it doesn’t cost a thing – What have you been up to?”
“Oh, fine. I’m just looking at the poster from my party, it was such a lovely party. I’ve still got all the flowers.”
“Yeah, wasn’t it nice? People came from all over for you,” I say.
“It was a beautiful day. Beautiful, beautiful,” she says. “It’s too bad you couldn’t have been there.”
“What” I say. “I was there. You don’t remember I was there?”
“Oh yes, that’s right,” she says. “I remember.”
“I flew all the way out to be there!”
“You were there. That’s right. Of course you were there.”
“We sat next to one another the whole time. You don’t remember?”
“That’s right. I remember you were there,” she says, totally unphased. “Wasn’t it nice?”
“Yeah, do you remember the big strawberry shortcake?” I say pathetically. “That was the kind you wanted.”
“It was very good,” she says. “You need anything?”
“No, Nonie. I don’t need anything.”
“That’s good to hear! Well, it was so nice to hear your voice,” she says. “Thanks for calling! I love –“
“No – Nonie, talk to me! What have you been up to? How are you?”
“Same old! Nothing!”
“No, talk to me, Nonie. Tell me how you’ve been.”
“Where are you calling from!”
I tell her that I’m in D.C. but that the phone call is free. It’s important, it seems, to keep her on as long as possible, even though I know what will happen when we hang up. Two minutes or four, it won’t make much of a difference. When she hangs up, I know where she will go. As soon as the phone hits the cradle, anything I’ve said will start to slip. By the time she huffs over to the living room and topples backwards into the afghan-covered recliner, the light will have shifted.
Francesca Mari’s work has appeared in Paris Review Daily, n+1, The Believer, The New Republic, and The New York Times Book Review.