The Summer Without Men

gleamed bright and hard. She had curled butter for parties, arranged flowers, hung out and ironed sheets that smelled of clean sun when you slept in them. She had sung to us at night, handed us edifying reading material, censored movies, and defended her daughters to uncomprehending schoolteachers. And when we were sick, she would make a bed for the ailing child on the floor near her while she did the housework. I loved being unwell with Mama, not vomiting or truly miserable perhaps, but in a state of recovery by increments. I loved to lie on the special bed and feel Mama’s hand on my forehead, which she then moved up into my sweaty hair as she checked the fevern joved to sense her legs moving near me, to listen to her voice take on that special intonation for the invalid, songlike and tender, which would make me want to stay ill, to lie there forever on the little pallet, pale, Romantic, and pathetic, half me, half swooning actress, but always securely orbited by my mother.
    Sometimes now, her hands shook in the kitchen and a plate or spoon would drop suddenly to the floor. She remained elegant and immaculate in her dress, but worried terribly over spots, wrinkles, and shoes that were improperly shined, something I didn’t remember from when I was young. I think the shining house had gone inward and been replaced by shining garments. Her memory sometimes lapsed, but only about recent incidents or sentences just uttered. The early days of her life had an acuity that seemed almost supernatural. As she aged, I did more and she did less, but this change in our rapport seemed minor. Although the indefatigable champion of domesticity had vanished, the woman who had fixed up a little bed to keep her sick children near her sat across from me, undiminished.
    “I always thought you felt too much,” she said, repeating a family theme, “that you were overly sensitive, a princess on the pea, and now with Boris…” My mother’s expression turned rigid. “How could he? He’s over sixty. He must be crazy…” She glanced at me and put her hand over her mouth.
    I laughed.
    “You’re still beautiful,” my mother said.
    “Thanks, Mama.” The comment was no doubt meant for Boris. How could you desert the still beautiful ? “I want you to know,” I said, in answer to nothing, “that the doctors really say I am recovered, that this can happen and then never happen again. They believe that I have returned to myself—just a garden-variety neurotic—nothing more.”
    “I think teaching that little class will do you good. Are you looking forward to it at all?” Her voice cracked with feeling—hope mingled with anxiety.
    “Yes,” I said. “Although I’ve never taught children.”
    My mother was silent, then said, “Do you think Boris will get over it?”
    The “it” was actually a “she,” but I appreciated my mother’s tact. We would not give it a name. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what goes on in him. I never have.”
    My mother nodded sadly, as if she knew all about it, as if this turn in my marriage were part of a world script she had glimpsed long ago. Mama, the Sage. The reverberations of felt meaning moved like a current through her thin body. This had not changed.
    As I walked down the hallway of Rolling Meadows East, I found myself humming and then singing softly,
     
Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder what you’re at!
Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea-tray in the sky.
    *   *   *
     
    I managed the mornings of that first week, working quietly at the borrowed desk, then reading for a couple of hours until the afternoon visits and long talks with my mother. I listened to her stories about Boston and my grandparents, to her recitation of the idyllic routines of her middle-class childhood, disrupted now and again by her brother Harry, an imp, not a revolutionary, who died at twelve of polio when my mother was nine and changed her world. She had told herself on that day in December to write down everything she remembered about Harry, and she did it for months on end. “Harry couldn’t keep his feet still. He was always swinging them against the chair legs at breakfast.” “Harry had a freckle on his elbow that looked like a tiny mouse.” “I remember Harry cried in the closet once so I couldn’t see him.”
    I cooked dinner for Mama most evenings at my place or hers, feeding her well with meat and potatoes and pasta, and then I walked over the moist grass