Bridge of Sighs

chair’s dangerous, that it will come loose from the wall while she’s aboard or its gears will strip and send her plummeting backward to the bottom of the stairs. I argued, of course, that it would restore her freedom, that she could come and go as she pleased, without waiting for someone to help her. “And where would I go?” was her reply. Which did make me smile at how the tables had turned. When she and my father got me that first bike, her idea had been to get me out of the house and into the world. “Where should I go?” I remember asking. “Out,” she replied. “Away. Anywhere.” Having paid good money for the chair, I’d have liked to say the same to her, though of course I didn’t, and so it has remained, except on rare occasions, useless at the bottom of the stairs.
    Which is where my mother says, “There.” Which is shorthand for
I told you so,
for
I can manage the stairs just fine,
for
You wasted your money.
And, unless I’m mistaken, for
I enjoy my prison, the ugly smudge on my living room wall. Because some things in life can’t be painted or papered over, or fixed.
Which is what, she maintains, I’ve never understood.
    I help her into the car, where she sits staring down at her knees, refusing, as always, to look across the street at the house where we’d lived for most of my childhood. Five years ago, when it came back on the market, I bought it with the idea of showing her it wasn’t lost after all, but she would have none of that. “What would I do,” she said, “all alone in that big house?”
    “Live?” I suggested. “Like you used to?”
    But no. “It’d be too much work. I’m better off where I am.” Then the clincher. “Besides, it’s too late.”
    So, for now, a renewed tactic. “Would you like to try the new restaurant? The Top Drawer?” I ask her. “The food’s supposed to be good.”
    As if I didn’t know the answer.
             
     
    A T THE CURB outside Dot’s is a car whose bumper sticker sets my mother off. “Support our troops,” she says, her voice oozing disgust.
    This is a topic I’d rather avoid, because her opinions on impersonal matters of national and international scope have a way of becoming personal. She despises our president as a dishonest fool whose lies and stupidity have cost over two thousand American lives, but her deepest contempt is reserved for those who voted for him—her son, she suspects, among them, though I’ve never told her who I voted for. Sarah says my mother doesn’t intend for her political observations to be so personal, but how many times as a boy did I hear this same withering sarcasm applied to my father and, by extension, to me? “Lou. Why would you believe such a thing?” Well, my father would reply, because this guy swore it was true. “You’re telling me you believe it because he said it? That’s the reason?” He don’t have no reason to lie that I know of, my father would reply weakly. “Right. But he’s got about a hundred you don’t know of and will never find out about, because you take everything at face value. It’s what’s called being gullible, Lou.”
    Even more personal is her claim that our president’s stupidity is apparent in his physical appearance, particularly his facial expressions. All you have to do is look at him, she claims. Here, no doubt, Sarah’s right. I’m internalizing my mother’s attack on the president, who does, I admit, bear a striking resemblance to Alfred E. Neuman. But in general I reject the notion that what’s inside a person can be determined by his exterior. Large, slow-moving men like my father and me are often assumed to be slow witted as well, and in school it always took my teachers a while to realize I was bright. I’m the first to allow that my intelligence isn’t quick, but I am observant and methodical and, I believe, fair-minded. To me, it’s always seemed ironic that people who take the trouble to stop and think are often judged obtuse. When I was a boy, my mother had a habit of snapping her fingers when she asked me a question. “Come on, Lou, you’re smart. You know the answer. Don’t pretend you don’t.” That is, don’t pretend to be like your father, which was what she always seemed to be saying, and this made me even more deliberate. Even if it were true that I’m smarter than my father, who had none of my advantages, would that make me a better man?
    So I say, “Let’s not talk about the president.”
    “Fine,”