Still Life with Bread Crumbs (7 page)

One of the aides entered the room pushing another woman, slumped over in a high-backed wheeled chair, her bony head held aloft by some bracelike assemblage. In the nursing home it was typical that the patients were fragile reeds while the aides were brawny women with large arms and legs. The aides were weight lifters, the patients the weights. The social workers and nurses tended to be smaller, usually Indian. The aides were black women from the Caribbean. They were realistic, a little blunt. “She’s having a bad week,” they might say, or even, “I’ve had it with her today.” The Indian women had melodic voices and were cheery, optimistic. “Someday she will look up and say, ah, there is my daughter,” one had said during her last visit. It was all Rebecca could do not to reply, “She didn’t do that when I was eight. Why would she do it now?”

As these places went, it was a good place. All of the money left over from the sale of the family’s old apartment, after the many hungry creditors of the business had been satisfied, went to pay for it. But that had been a decade ago, before selling an apartment like the one Rebecca had grown up in had been like winning a lottery. The income from the investments was not enough, the principal had been breached, the cash was running like sand through the hourglass of Bebe’s days, and every month Rebecca wrote a check to supplement it and prayed that the market would spike and the nursing home fees remain flat.

The aide nodded toward Rebecca’s mother. “Don’t you interrupt her,” she said.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Rebecca said. She sat for almost an hour and her mother never stopped playing, her fingers moving ceaselessly. “I wish I could have heard her in the old days,” the aide said. “You ever hear her?”

“Yes,” Rebecca said, looking at her little gold watch. Even with her mother as insensible as she was, she had not dared to wear the practical plastic digital watch. She told herself that it was because that belonged to one life, the gold watch to another, but she had heard in her head, as clear as a Chopin étude, the sound of her mother saying, “What on earth is that on your wrist?” Those high-pitched intonations, silent now for years, still unmistakable. Rebecca’s own syntax was stiff and old-fashioned because, when she was growing up, her mother had made slang, even contractions, seem like obscenities. “Honey, dangle a participle every once in a while,” Dorothea had said to her one night in college, and Rebecca had flushed, embarrassed.

Her mother stopped moving, perhaps at the end of a piece, then began again. Childhood, girlhood, school vacations, visits: don’t interrupt your mother while she is playing. The grand piano was in a corner of the living room, but you could feel the vibration in the glossy parquet of the foyer. Sometimes Rebecca just put down her bag full of books and went directly to the
kitchen in the back, with the dim windows overlooking the air shaft, and the big table with the mottled vinyl surface and the matching chairs, to get a cookie, or a lemonade, or a cup of tea from Sonya, the housekeeper.

She’d aged well, Sonya. She had one of those strong Slavic faces that was much the same at seventy as it had been at seventeen. That was how old she had been when she came to work for the Winter family, when Rebecca was just seven. Even then she had kept her fair hair scraped back so tight that it was the equivalent of a face-lift. Not a crease or a wrinkle.

“Good you are here,” Sonya said when she opened the door of the apartment she shared with Rebecca’s father, up one of those leafy roads behind the nursing home, its proximity to Rebecca’s mother a reflection of an assumption the world made about the relationship between Bebe and Oscar Winter as well as Rebecca’s desire to make visiting her parents as simple and easy as possible. Sonya’s slightly fractured English had not changed, either, even after all these years of shopping at the Safeway and screaming at the dry cleaner on the telephone.

“Aha!” her father said from the recliner chair, a glass of tea on the table next to him. “Come sit!” It was what had always made Rebecca feel loved when she was a child, the tone of excitement in her father’s nasal voice. When she had entered the dining room in the morning for breakfast his greeting suggested a visiting dignitary: “My beauty! Have some toast! Sonya! Marmalade for my princess!” Then she went to the office with him for the first time when she was eight and discovered that he spoke to everyone that way. “Irving! Good to see you!” he said to an acquaintance in the bank. “Ramona, my love!” he called to the waitress at the kosher deli, ordering corned beef as though he had just invented it and wanted to introduce it to the entire room. It made everyone like him, but it had disappointed Rebecca, to know she was not special in that way.

“How is your mother?” he asked. “Good?” He always assumed
Rebecca had gone to the nursing home first, made it clear that this seemed to him absolutely correct. “A good daughter,” he always told people, always had, always would. Sonya put a glass of tea next to Rebecca, and two Pepperidge Farm cookies still in their cup of white fluted paper.

(“Vulgar,” Bebe said in Rebecca’s head. “Sonya? Take this back into the kitchen and put it on a proper plate.”)

Rebecca shrugged. “Bach today,” she said.

“I never cared for Bach,” her father said. “Maybe the Goldberg Variations, but not the rest. It was too, too—what’s the word I’m looking for, Sonya, my love?”

“German,” Sonya said, disappearing into the kitchen.

“Hates the Germans,” Oscar Winter whispered.

“I know, Papa,” Rebecca said.

“I hear that bagel shop in your neighborhood is closing!” her father said. “Sonya saw it in the paper. That’s a shame! Those people made a good bagel. Not too soft. A bagel shouldn’t be too soft.”

Her father believed she was still living in her city apartment. It was better that way, with no explanations. Her father doesn’t like to talk on the phone, never did, never had. It flattens his affect. Sonya sends her emails on the small computer, handed down from one of her nephews, that she uses to play online poker. She is as she has always been, a woman of few words. “Papa defib,” the last message said. The paddles and a stent had done the trick. “The old ticker!” her father had said the next time she saw him, thumping on his chest with his palm. “Almost a century old!” Her father is actually nearly a decade shy of a century, but this is what he’s always done, rounded up high. It explains what happened to the family business.

“You look good, Papa,” Rebecca said. Compared to her mother, he does. Compared to her mother, everyone does.

“What can you do?” he said. That was another thing Rebecca remembered from her childhood. What can you do? Your wife
doesn’t care for you much, certainly not as much as she does lunching with friends and playing the piano. The family business her father passed on to you, that seemed to just run on custom and inertia, that once spit out cash like the U.S. Mint, begins to falter and then fail. The big apartment facing the park gets run-down. The wife starts to lose her moorings, until instead of playing the baby grand she plays the fraying satin counterpane in the mornings, the dining table in the evening. Your daughter finds a place for her mother, finds a buyer for the apartment. The daughter helps as much as she can, but what can you say, children aren’t meant to take care of their parents, you’ve always insisted on that ever since you got saddled with your own. But you’re in luck! The housekeeper takes an apartment three blocks from the home where the wife lives! Sonya! You’re a saint, a godsend, a port in a storm!

Rebecca doesn’t know what Sonya is exactly. It’s a two-bedroom apartment. Is it possible that her father and Sonya sleep together? Is it possible they always have? Should she care? Her parents had separate bedrooms. Her father’s was small and hunter green, her mother’s enormous and aqua blue. “He snores,” Bebe said. “He should have had his adenoids removed as a child. It’s too late now.”

“I have to get over there to see your mother one of these days,” Oscar said, pointing at Rebecca’s cookies and then at his mouth. He winked, his pale eyes large and opaque. For his entire life her father had worn glasses, only the style changing with fashion: round wire rims when he was a boy, black plastic frames as a young married, then those enormous fishbowls that came with disco and leisure suits. When had he stopped wearing them? Rebecca wondered what he saw now, whether Sonya looked beautiful, his daughter ageless, the apartment spacious, elegant.

She passed him a cookie and he popped it whole into his mouth. “Were you born in a barn?” her mother would say to him when Rebecca was a child about his table manners. “Kings County Hospital, charity ward!” he would reply triumphantly.
“I can’t understand why anyone would boast about that,” her mother would say, waving her hand.

“Sonya!” he called. “I have to get over to see Mrs. Winter one of these days!”

Rebecca was not sure, but she thought she heard a grunt from the kitchen.

In the hallway she looked at the painting above the big antique desk at which her father had once gone over the account ledgers when he brought work home. Rebecca hoped that no one in Sonya’s large tendentious Polish family knew the painting was a Mary Cassatt. A minor Mary Cassatt, but still worth something. Bebe’s father had given it to his daughter as a wedding gift. Not to her and his new son-in-law, but to her alone. A lawyer had said several years before that Oscar could sell it if he had his wife declared incompetent.

“The fellow doesn’t know your mother,” her father had said. “Incompetent! She’d murder me!”

“Papa, she doesn’t even know who we are anymore.”

“Doesn’t matter! She’d murder us both in our beds.”

“Is it insured?” Rebecca had once asked, looking at the painting.

“What do you think?” her father had replied. She thought that she had no idea.

She leaned closer. It was a watercolor, and it had been hung out of the light, protected with the proper glass. Thank God for small favors.

Sonya came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on an ancient dish towel. She was wearing pale blue pants and a matching tunic. When she first came to work for the Winters, she wore a dress version of the same thing: pale blue one week, mint green the next, yellow the week after that. The dresses had zippers up the front. The pants she wears now have elastic waistbands. Sonya wears a uniform that she can credibly say is not a uniform.

Together the two looked at the painting, of a young woman
gazing at her baby daughter, her face alight, the child’s hand reaching toward her. Sonya seemed uninterested. “Come again soon,” she said at the door. Her shoes are white, like those of a nurse. They always have been.

“You made my day!” her father called, and then there was a click as the television went on.

While Rebecca was on the thruway driving—speeding, fleeing—from the northern reaches of New York City, stopping at a farm stand for corn, tomatoes, and some beans, a dog wandered into her yard and sniffed the foundation of the cottage. He made his way from the front door, which was faintly redolent of soup of some sort, around to the back steps, where a crumb from a muffin Rebecca had eaten before leaving home, eaten standing in the doorway while peering into the woods for the source of some unaccustomed snapping sounds, lingered in the grass. A family of ants were beneath the crumb, preparing to hoist and carry, but the dog preempted their effort. In the process he ate not just the crumb but two of the ants. He wasn’t picky.

His nominal owner was haphazard about feeding him—haphazard, in fact, about almost everything. One day a can of
tuna and half a hot dog roll, the next day nothing. One day extravagant petting and ear scratching, the next a complete absence of any attention at all or even, on occasion, a thrown pillow or a kick, easily evaded. The dog had cycled through several houses in the four years since he’d been born in a shed near the county line, the result of a liaison between a mother mostly coonhound and Labrador and a father part golden retriever and part German shepherd. The result was the kind of scruffy shaggy sand-colored dog with aggressive eyebrows and curling tail that occasionally appears in movies or sitcoms as comic relief but that people in the country usually keep for some specific and unsentimental task.

The first place he had lived was a ramshackle split-level house where a pair of high school sweethearts were cooking meth and needed a guard dog to make sure neither their competitors nor the cops rolled up on them suddenly. They kept the dog on the end of a chain bolted to one side of the garage, and during the winter he barked all day because he was so cold. It was his good luck that one night when the temperature was near zero the chain froze and snapped, and he ran free into the blackness with five links clanking on the asphalt between his front paws.

A school bus driver picked him up on his way back from the morning run to the middle school and took him to the shelter, where he was one cage of cute puppies away from death by lethal injection when he was adopted by a home health aide whose elderly father was recovering from prostate surgery and needed company. It was a nice warm house, but the old man mainly nodded off on the couch while the TV shouted in the background, and a dog’s gotta do what a dog’s gotta do, and when he did it one time too many the woman took him back to the shelter. “The hell he’s housebroken,” she snarled at the front desk clerk, and the dog tucked his tail and ducked his head as he was led back, a recidivist.

Two days later he walked out with a man who said he wanted a family pet—the dog’s file card still said housebroken, which was accurate if he was in a house in which anyone ever opened the door more often than every twelve hours—but who really wanted a dog to hunt with. He’d moved to the area from the suburbs, and he didn’t know anything about hunting, much less hunting dogs, or he would have known the dog was a bad candidate: the golden retriever part with no aggression, the shepherd part with too much. Coonhound and Labrador only went so far, watered down, and the dog was afraid of the gun, and the first time the man attempted, unsuccessfully, to bring down a duck, the dog took off into the woods and ran until he felt as though the beating of his heart and the throb of his blood would make his chest explode. When he arrived at a tricked-out trailer, its white siding and black shutters and foundation latticework giving it the illusion of a small house if the light was fading, he merely dropped to the grass and, panting hard, fell asleep.