I didn’t know what to say. It was the first I’d heard about the taxes, although it was certainly no secret that my mother didn’t trust my dad where money was concerned.
“God, but she could hold on to a grievance,” he said, with a half-humorous wince, wiping his hand down the front of his face. “Tit for tat. Always looking to even the score. Because, I mean it—she never forgot anything. If she had to wait twenty years, she was going to get you back. And sure, I’m the one who always looks like the bad guy and maybe I am the bad guy…”
The painting, though small, was getting heavy, and my face felt frozen with the effort of concealing my discomfort. In order to block his voice out I started counting to myself in Spanish. Uno dos tres, cuatro cinco seis…
By the time I reached twenty-nine, Xandra had appeared.
“Larry,” she said, “you and your wife had a really nice place here.” The way she said it made me feel bad for her without liking her any better.
My dad put his arm around her waist and drew her to him with a sort of kneading motion that made me sick. “Well,” he said modestly, “it’s really more hers than mine.”
You can say that again, I thought.
“Come in here,” said my dad, catching her by the hand and leading her away towards my mother’s bedroom, all thought of me forgotten. “I want you to see something.” I turned and watched them go, queasy at the prospect of Xandra and my father pawing through my mother’s things but so glad to see them go I didn’t care.
With one eye on the empty doorway, I walked around to the far side of my bed and placed the painting out of sight. An old New York Post lay on the floor—the same newspaper that she’d thrown in to me, in a flap, on our last Saturday together. Here, kiddo, she’d said, sticking her head in at the door, pick a movie. Though there were several movies we both would have liked, I’d chosen a matinee at the Boris Karloff film festival: The Body Snatcher. She had accepted my choice without a word of complaint; we’d gone down to Film Forum, watched the movie, and after it was over walked to Moondance Diner for a hamburger—a perfectly pleasant Saturday afternoon, apart from the fact that it was her last on Earth, and now I felt rotten whenever I thought about it, since (thanks to me) the last movie she’d ever seen was a corny old horror flick about corpses and grave-robbing. (If I’d picked the movie I knew she wanted to see—the well-reviewed one about Parisian children during World War I—might she have lived, somehow? My thoughts often ran along such dark, superstitious faultlines.)
Though the newspaper felt sacrosanct, an historical document, I turned it to the middle and took it apart. Grimly, I wrapped the painting, sheet by sheet, and taped it up with the same tape I’d used a few months before to wrap my mother’s Christmas present. Perfect! she’d said, in a storm of colored paper, leaning in her bathrobe to kiss me: a watercolor set she would never be carrying to the park, on Saturday mornings in summer she would never see.
My bed—a brass camp bed from the flea market, soldierly and reassuring—had always seemed like the safest place in the world to hide something. But now, looking around (beat-up desk, Japanese Godzilla poster, the penguin mug from the zoo that I used as a pencil cup), I felt the impermanence of it all strike me hard; and it made me dizzy to think of all our things flying out of the apartment, furniture and silver and all my mother’s clothes: sample-sale dresses with the tags still on them, all those colored ballet slippers and tailored shirts with her initials on the cuffs. Chairs and Chinese lamps, old jazz records on vinyl that she’d bought down in the Village, jars of marmalade and olives and sharp German mustard in the refrigerator. In the bathroom, a bewilderment of perfumed oils and moisturizers, colored bubble bath, half-empty bottles of overpriced shampoo crowded on the side of the tub (Kiehl’s, Klorane, Kérastase, my mother always had five or six kinds going). How could the apartment have seemed so permanent and solid-looking when it was only a stage set, waiting to be struck and carried away by movers in uniform?
When I walked into the living room, I was confronted by a sweater of my mother’s lying across the chair where she’d left it, a sky-blue ghost of her. Shells we’d picked up on the beach at Wellfleet. Hyacinths, which she’d bought at the Korean market a few days before she died, with the stems draped dead-black and rotten over the side of the pot. In the wastebasket: catalogues from Dover Books, Belgian Shoes; a wrapper from a pack of Necco Wafers, which had been her favorite candy. I picked it up and sniffed it. The sweater—I knew—would smell of her too if I picked it up and put it to my face, yet even the sight of it was unendurable.