Irene

For 388 days in a row, my stepfather, wearing a tired button-front shirt and a wrinkled silk tie, the sign of a classy man, visited his mother, Irene, in the Northshore Candlelight Nursing Home. On the 389th day, the day he didn’t show up, she closed her paper-thin eyelids and finally died.

He leans in and speaks low. “The nerve,” he says through a bite of tomato and turkey. He covers his mouth with the sandwich.

“She waited for you not to come,” I tell him.

He keeps chewing. Mustard yellows the bottom of his moustache. Little squirts drip onto his chin. He smirks.

“She denied me one final moment of happiness,” he says and tightens his grip. Thin shreds of coleslaw wriggle out, making it seem as if he’s squashing a baby octopus between slices of rye bread.

“But she was your mother,” I say in disbelief. The spot of sour cream in my soup is starting to melt.

“She was a rotten, miserable person,” he adds as if this is enough to explain his pitiless sentiment. He keeps chewing and sipping, smiling when the waitress comes by and tops off his coffee. I never liked Irene. I thought it was because I was her step grandchild. I shake my head, thinking of the various reasons I’ve used to rationalize her meanness. I dip a buttery role into the bowl of split pea. The dish is warm and hearty—two words I’d never use to describe Irene. My father is right. She was a wretch.

That he would let her live in squalor, though, that was something I would’ve never anticipated. Three years prior to her death, Irene is in hospital and we need to bring her a few things. The trees are bare, the sky is white as mom and I approach the brownstone. The bricks are worn-out and the building is starting to slump. Windows are stuffed with rusted out air-conditioning units, threadbare towels, and filthy drapes. The walk to the courtyard is a parade of garbage, tossed confetti of carry-out food containers, coffee cups and plastic bags.

“We have to be fast. Tuck in your pants,” mom says.

We kneel forward and jam our jeans inside our winter boots. We walk through a littered courtyard and stop in front of a glass door held together with a large silver X of duct tape.

“This is it,” mom says. The door is a framed rectangle of glass that’s held together by a tall, silver ‘X’ of duct tape. She points at a dirty vertical row of half-cracked buttons. Irene Trilling is penciled in gray, the last name given to her by her seventh husband. Up the stairs we go, towards the second floor where the stench grows—urine, sweat, curry, onions, and the nasty bits of boiled fish.

  Mom unlocks the apartment door and reaches inside. The front room light flickers and pops to its full dimness. Little feet scurry across the wooden floor. Cockroaches twitch their antennas, peck-peck, along the creamy French provincial furniture. A few drop off the television set. Others bury under the pink sofa cushions. The sound of spindly legs comes from every corner. In the kitchen, they charge beneath the cabinets and the old Tappan oven. Pests cling to the thick layer of frost coating the freezer’s roof of the freezer. Brown shells slumber in the empty squares of ice cube trays. I twitch and pat down my sides checking pockets because cockroaches like to be touched and they prefer a tight fit. One of Irene’s orange pill bottles is sitting on the counter. A sticky little leg rubs across the label with the name of my stepfather’s pharmacy.

It wasn’t always like this. I was ten years old the last time I was here, my sister and I standing in rabbit fur coats with yellow plastic bows clipped in our hair. Irene wore a cream pantsuit with an albino snakeskin belt cinching her slight waist. Her hair was piled on her head, like a slanted anthill and she wore heavy gold broaches and rings. Her home smelled like talcum powder and pints of peach ice cream and the furniture was distressed with white and gold edges, ersatz antique. She failed to notice my sister or me. She kissed coral lipstick all over my father’s face and nodded politely to my mother, and looked at us as an afterthought.

“Don’t I look dynamite,” she said.

“Yes, Auntie,” we said, which brings me to the first time I met Irene.

In preschool, while still learning about my new father, the last one having died, Irene shook my hand and politely touched her blonde coiffed hair and said, “I want you to call me Auntie.”  After the luncheon introduction at Barnum & Bagel, where I was already confused by a mound of chopped liver sitting cud-like in the middle of the table, and surrounded by walls full of ghastly sad clown faces, I turned to my mother and whined, “She’s too old to be my aunt. She’s nothing like Christine.”  Christine was sixteen with cornflower blue eyes and a pretty mouth and she was my real aunt, not this older woman who stole crackers in her scarf.

I called Irene ‘auntie’ up until my thirteenth birthday, up until she bought me a cheap plastic doll and ruined the dinner by loudly wailing how wonderful she was as she lifted her pleated skirt and spun around for the entire restaurant to look at her beautiful legs.

I visit Irene in the nursing home once, when I am in my twenties. The floor has a wooden plaque that lists the staff’s pick for ‘patient-of-the-week.’ I stop at the front desk and ask if Irene has ever been on the wall and the Polish nurse with red hair and forgiving eyes puts down her chart, and says, “Never.” 

Irene’s room is private and the walls are empty. Her paralytic state made it impossible for her to hang family pictures or mementos. In the year she’d been there, my father never offered to hammer a nail.

Irene is seated on her bed, pushed to the far corner of the opposite wall, her hair uncharacteristically down and pure white, and she is propped up by pillows, which force her yell directly towards me as I enter the room. “Oh, look at you,” she says as I come closer to her bed and bend to give a kiss, and as I near her cheek the spittle on her lips starts to pill with phlegm and her wicked words begin to spew, “You know you’re not smart enough for Harvard.”  I kiss her anyway and then crush my lips into her chewed up watery ear, and say, “I know, grandma, but I’m going and I’m sorry you won’t be able to visit.”   

The eve before the funeral, the rabbi arrives at the house to express his condolences and asks for fond memories of Irene, for words he can share at the graveside, which leaves my family silently sitting around a long glass dining table, stunned and mortified, embarrassingly searching each others’ eyes for something polite to say. The rabbi can’t believe what he is not hearing and when words finally come they are from my father who without a tear says, “My mother was a miserable human being.”  The rabbi says nothing. I’m in awe of this cold declaration and I want to offset the harsh words so I offer, “Well, she liked to shop and she was always impeccably dressed, and loved the arts and poetry; but she especially liked to spell.”  S-P-E-L-L. What I won’t tell him is that her spelling bees were meant to boost her ego and to dampen my brilliance. This was accomplished through her patterned recitation of words like biscuit or aluminum, wherein she’d first say the whole world, ‘aluminum’ and then spell it out letter-by-letter: a-l-u-m-i-n-u-m; and then she’d say the word again, “Aluminum, dear, can you spell that?  I bet you can’t beat Auntie.”  In seventh grade, I’m finally prepared and challenge her with antediluvian and adustiosis, knowing that she doesn’t stand a chance, knowing that because she never asks about me or what I’m doing, she can’t possibly know I’m in the running for the state spelling bee.

We are standing over Irene’s body, before the lid of the plain box is tightly shut, and she looks like the grandmother I always wanted, silently approving and ready to cover my face with creamy orange kisses. I watch my mother stare into the coffin and fidget with the back of her clasp-on earring that is reddening her lobe. She tugs it off, slides it into her purse and says, “We need more dog food.”  My father shrugs his shoulders okay and walks out of the parlor, into the cold sun, and my mother turns to me and says, “Your father and I want to get home to watch Six Feet Under.”  This statement is what finally makes me cry and ask, “How can you be so casual, so cruel?  She’s never coming back. Mom, I’d never treat you like this.”  She says, “I know and that’s because we love each other. Your father wasn’t so lucky.”  My mother hugs my shoulder, pressing me out the door, leading me away from my grandmother, who finally, in death, is as beautiful as she always wanted everyone to believe.