Patty looked around her mother’s small kitchen. It was spotless, thanks to Olga, a woman older than Patty who came in twice a week. But the table she sat at had a linoleum top that was cracked at the corners, and the curtains at the window were very faded in their blue. And Patty could see from where she sat, down the hallway to the corner of the living room, the blue beanbag chair that her mother, after all these years, refused to give up.
Her mother was talking—so often this was the case these days—of things from the past. “All those dances at The Club. My goodness, they were fun.” Her mother paused to shake her head with wonder.
Patty put another slab of butter on her potatoes, ate the potatoes, and then pushed the plate aside. “Lucy Barton’s written a memoir,” she said.
Her mother said, “What did you say?” And Patty repeated it.
“Now I remember,” her mother said. “They used to live in a garage, and then the old man died—whatever relative he was, I have no idea—but they moved into the house.”
“A garage? Is that where I remember going? A garage?”
Her mother said, after a moment, “I don’t know, I can’t remember, but she was very inexpensive, that’s why I used her. She did wonderful work really, and she barely charged a nickel for it.” After a long moment, her mother said, “I saw Lucy on TV a few years ago. Hot shot. She wrote a book or something. Lives in New York. Smork. La-de-dah.”
Patty took a deep, unquiet breath. Her mother reached for the coleslaw, and as her bathrobe fell open slightly, Patty could see—briefly—the flattened small breast beneath the nightgown. After a few minutes Patty stood up, cleared the table, and did the dishes rapidly. “Let’s check your meds,” she said, and her mother waved a hand dismissively. So Patty went into the bathroom and found the container with the divided daily sections, and saw that her mother had not taken any of the pills since Patty was last there. Patty brought the container out to her mother and explained again why each pill was important, and her mother said, “All right.” She took the pills that Patty handed her. “You need to take these,” Patty told her. “You don’t want to have a stroke.” She did not say anything about the medicine that was supposed to slow dementia.
“I’m not going to have a stroke. Stroke poke.”
“Okay, I’ll see you soon.”
“You turned out the best,” her mother said at the door. “It’s too bad your be-happy pills added that weight, but you’re still pretty. Are you sure you have to go?”
Walking down the driveway to her car, Patty said out loud, “Oh my gosh.”
The sun had just set, and by the time Patty was halfway home—past the windmills—the full moon was starting to rise. The night her father died the moon was full, and in Patty’s mind every time the moon became full she felt that her father was watching her. She wiggled her fingers from the steering wheel as a hello to him. Love you, Daddy, she whispered. And she meant Sibby as well, for they had merged, in a way, in her mind. They were up there watching her, and she knew that the moon was just a rock—a rock!—but the sight of its fullness always made her feel that her men were out there, up there, too. Wait for me, she whispered. Because she knew—she almost knew—that when she died she would be with her father and Sibby again. Thank you, she whispered, because her father had just told her it was good of her to take care of her mother. He was generous now in this way; death had given that to him.
At home, the lights she’d left on made her house appear cozy; it was one of many things she had learned about living alone, leaving lights on. And yet as she put her pocketbook down, moved through the living room, the ghastliness descended; her day had been a bad one. Lila Lane had shaken her profoundly, and what if the girl reported her, told the principal that Patty had called her a piece of filth? She could do that, Lila Lane. She was up to doing that. Patty’s sister had been no help, there was no point in calling her other sister, who lived in L.A. and never had time to talk, and her mother—oh, her mother…
“Fatty Patty.” Patty said these words aloud.
Patty sat down on her couch and looked around; the house seemed faintly unfamiliar, and this was—she had learned—a bad sign. A taste of meatloaf was in her mouth. “Fatty Patty, you get yourself ready for the night,” she said out loud, and she rose, and flossed her teeth and then brushed them, and washed her face; she put her face cream on, and this made her feel just a little bit better. When she looked into her pocketbook to find her phone, she saw the small book by Lucy Barton that she had slipped in there earlier. She sat down and examined the cover. It showed a city building at dusk with its lights on. Then she began to read the book. “Holy moley,” she said, after a few pages. “Oh my gosh.”
The next morning, Saturday, Patty vacuumed the upstairs of her house and then the downstairs, she changed the bed, did the laundry, and she went through the mail, tossing out the catalogs and flyers. Then Patty went into town and bought groceries, and she bought some flowers too. It had been a long time since she had bought flowers for her house. All day she had the sense of having a piece of yellow-colored candy, maybe butterscotch, tucked inside the back crevices of her mouth, and she knew that this private sweetness came from Lucy Barton’s memoir. Every so often Patty shook her head and said “Huh” aloud.
In the afternoon she called her mother, and Olga answered. Patty asked her if she could come every day now instead of two days a week, and Olga said she’d have to think about it, and Patty said she understood. Then Patty asked to speak to her mother. “Who is this?” her mother asked. And Patty said, “It’s me, Patty. Your daughter. I love you, Mom.”
In a moment her mother said, “Well, I love you too.”
After that, Patty had to lie down. She could not have said the last time she’d told her mother she loved her. As a child she had said it frequently, she may have even said it that morning when her mother agreed that Patty didn’t have to be in Girl Scouts anymore, Patty being a freshman in high school, and her mother said, “Oh, Patty, that’s okay, you’re old enough now to decide,” her mother standing in the kitchen handing her lunch to her in a paper bag, just being herself, Patty’s mother. And then Patty had come home from school that same day, in the middle of the day, with cramps—terrible cramps Patty used to have—and Patty came home, and she heard the most astonishing sounds coming from her parents’ bedroom. Her mother was crying, gasping, shrieking, and there was the sound of skin being slapped, and Patty had run upstairs and seen her mother astride Mr. Delaney—Patty’s Spanish teacher!—and her mother’s breasts were swaying and this man was spanking her mother and his mouth reached up and took her mother’s breast and her mother wailed. And what Patty never forgot was the look of her mother’s eyes, they were wild; her mother could not stop herself from wailing, this is what Patty saw, her mother’s breasts and her mother’s eyes looking at her—yet unable to stop what was coming from her mouth.
Patty had turned and run into her bedroom. After a few minutes, Mr. Delaney’s footsteps were heard going down the stairs, and her mother came into her room, a housecoat around her, and her mother said, “Patty, I swear to God you must never tell a soul, and when you’re older, you’ll understand.”
That her mother’s breasts were so big Patty would not have imagined, seeing them unharnessed and swinging over that man.