Before the water was poured, Allison said, “I’m not feeling well, Lil. This medicine I’m taking for my stomach is making me feel awful. I don’t know why I’m taking it.”
“Why are you?”
“Why, why. Because the doctor told me to, that’s why. I have a great problem with my stomach. You know how sick I am.”
Lily stared straight ahead. Ten years ago, Allison had an emergency operation for a perforated ulcer.
Ten years ago!
“You didn’t ask about Joshua, Mom.”
“How is that Joshua?”
“We broke up. Rather, he broke up with me.”
“He did? Why? I thought you got along so well.” She managed to inflect but just barely.
“Not really. I wasn’t a good enough listener for him, I think. All he wanted to do was talk about himself.”
“Ah, well. You’ll find somebody else. You’re still so young.” She sighed operatically. “Not like me. I’m so depressed, Lily.”
Of course you are. “Mom, how can you be depressed in a place like this? Look all around you.” Where depression was loss of color, Hawaii was color’s surfeit.
“Oh, what’s Hawaii to me? I’m so unhappy. Don’t you know you carry what’s inside you wherever you go?”
Lily supposed. For Hemingway, Paris was a moveable feast. For her grandmother it was Poland—one word synonymous with apocalypse and kielbasa. Lily’s mother’s moveable feast was misery.
Not this conversation again. “Why are you unhappy?” she said, trying to inflect, trying and failing, trying not to let lifelong impatience creep into her voice. “Why are you unhappy? You have a beautiful life. You don’t have to work. You don’t have to worry about money. You can travel, you can read, you can swim, fish, snorkel. You have all your faculties, plus a husband who loves you.”
Allison sighed again.
“Mom, Papi loves you.”
“Oh, Lily, you’re so naïve.” She shook her head and looked into her food. “What is this love you talk about? Once, your father and I, true, we had love. But that was a long time ago.” Allison gnashed on her teeth. “Your father is very cruel. You don’t even know.”
Their lobster was brought. Lily tried to remember her first sixteen years of life with her mother and father. “Papi’s not cruel.” Papi was too passive to be cruel, she wanted to say.
“This is what I mean about naïve! How can I even talk to you about this if you won’t listen to me.”
“I’m listening,” said Lily, but wished she weren’t. She kept picking at her lobster with a fork. Her mother stopped eating completely.
“Your father is very controlling, very unkind. And he doesn’t understand my depression, he doesn’t understand how unhappy I am, and worse, he doesn’t care. He is like you—he says, what do you have to be depressed about.”
“Mom,” Lily said quietly. “Answer me. Answer him. What do you have to be depressed about?”
Tears appeared in Allison’s eyes. “My whole life is a complete failure.”
“Why do you say this?” Lily wished she could be more outraged. She wanted to be outraged. If this were the first time she was hearing it, she might be. Soon her mother would wave off mention of the four children she had ably raised, of the six grandchildren she had, of the various happy lives of her offspring, of her son, the congressman! She would bring forth mention of a job she didn’t get when she became pregnant with Lily, as if that job would have been the panacea for the ills of the currently afflicted. She would bring forth Lily’s father, and how Allison’s whole life had revolved around him. “He was the tree under whose shadow we all fell.”
Did Allison just say that, or was the voice inside Lily’s head so frigging loud?
She looked up at her mother, who nodded. “Yes, yes, it’s true, you, too, Lily, you, too, were under his shadow. Under his and Andrew’s. I don’t know why you girls love Andrew so much, he was never there for you. Especially for you. He would take you out once a month to the movies, and you thought he was a gift from God, why? I would spend all day, every day with you, parks, bike rides, ice skating, movies, book stores, and I never got you to look at me with a hundredth of the affection you looked at him. And you ask me why I’m bitter.”
“I didn’t ask,” Lily said.
“My son—is he all right, by the way? Now that his father is not here, he stopped calling.”
“He doesn’t call anybody.”
“What’s your excuse? Or your sisters’? None of you ever call me. Amanda has more kids than anybody and she calls me the most, and that’s hardly ever. Just you wait, wait till you’re my age. I hope God will give you daughters as ungrateful as yourself.”
To say Lily wished she were anywhere but here would have been like saying she preferred to sleep in a comfortable bed rather than on a bed of rusty nails.
“Mom,” she said, “you could be in New York, seeing us every week. But you moved to Hawaii. What do you want?”
“To die,” said Allison. “Sometimes that’s all I want, relief from the blackness.” She took Lily’s hand. “Daughter, I think of killing myself sometimes, but I’m too afraid of God. I think of killing myself every day.”
Lily took her hand away. Did this, or did this not, count as psychological abuse? “I can’t believe you’re telling me this.”
“Daughters are supposed to be friends to their mothers in their old age.”
“I think they’re supposed to be daughters first. I can’t believe you’re telling me you want to die. Do you understand how wrong that is?” If only it had been the first time she were hearing it. But she had a vivid memory of being thirteen years old when her mother took her into the bedroom and told her calmly that she only had three months to live. Still, every time Lily heard it, it sounded like the first time. It felt like the first time.
“I’m not telling you to upset you. I’m telling you so you can be prepared. So you know that it wasn’t out of the blue. Your father, if he was a different man, maybe my life would be different. If only he understood me, sympathized with me.”
“Ma, Papi put food on our table for over forty years. Fed us, clothed us, paid for our college.”
“Could barely afford City College for you,” said Allison. “Didn’t have anything left for you.”
“City College is fine,” said Lily.
“And you’re repaying his kindness by refusing to graduate. You know we can’t afford to keep you. We pay for your apartment and for your grandmother’s house, and taxes and maintenance for this condo. We’re completely broke because we’re keeping three different homes.”
“I’ll get more hours at Noho Star. I’ll be fine.”
“Yes, but your grandmother, what about her? She’s not going anywhere, is she?”
“Guess not. Guess your mother is not going anywhere.”
Allison said nothing, but busied herself in pretending to pull out pieces of her lobster. “I can’t believe you haven’t graduated. Six years completely down the toilet. Six years of college so you can wash dishes at a diner. Well, I hope you’re a good dishwasher. Certainly you’ve had enough education to be the very best.”
Lily