Chapter 8
Callie trailed me down the stone walk to the road. At last, Annie said goodbye, but not before she imparted a weather report. “Rain tomorrow, rest of the week will be cool and sunny.”
“What’d you get me?” Callie asked as she pulled my sleeve.
“Oh, boring ... nothing you’re going to like.”
“What’d you get me?” she repeated, jumping up and down.
I turned to her and crouched. “I never fail. I got you kale.”
“A pail of kale?”
“Enough for a whale.”
“To eat in jail?” she rhymed back.
As I clicked the trunk, Lisa pulled up in her Subaru. Callie shouted to her, “Grandma Jo is here. She brought presents.”
“Well, of course! That’s her job,” Lisa said.
“How was the interview?” I asked.
“I don’t enjoy the process,” Lisa said. “But the restaurant comes first. I’ll have to send you a video because it won’t run on WbrK for a while.”
“Well, you look great, and I know you did a fabulous job.”
“You’re such a mom, Mom. Can’t imagine what you brought for Callie. Do you suppose she’ll like it?”
I gifted Callie with the exact toys and books Lisa had told me to bring in an email. I had to consult Lisa because I wasn’t sure which Lego set to buy. I didn’t want to get one Callie didn’t like or already had. We carried in my luggage, the gifts, and the fruit I had bought on the way.
Callie remained in the living room to play with her new Legos. Lisa toted my suitcase to the beautiful guest room on the second floor. My daughter had a knack for decorating. The wallpaper was serene, a cornflower blue. There was a queen-size bed, a wide armoire, a grandfather clock, a cherrywood rolltop desk, and Lisa’s favorite white ruffled curtains. I smelled a hint of marijuana. I opened the windows a crack. Refreshing air blew into the space. The room had a lovely view of the yard. I looked out the window to see a tree house, a tire swing, and, farther on, a grove of trees. A smattering of leaves drifted slowly to the lawn from the oaks and maples. I was in high spirits, so pleased I had come.
“How’s your dishwasher?” I asked Lisa as I lifted my suitcase onto the bed.
“Let me get that,” she offered. “I gave him another chance. He’s got a large family. Besides, I had no choice. It’s impossible to find anyone who wants to work these days. Mostly, I hire folks who fled the city during the pandemic, then decided to stay here. In fact, that’s how I found my new headwaiter. He’s an actor who turned his vacation home into his permanent residence. I met him when he came into the restaurant for supper.”
“Hmm. Supper. Speaking of, would you prefer to dine out?” I asked, willing to do whatever Lisa wanted, even though I knew it would be a significant drive to any place we went, and I’d had enough of the car my first day. Lisa had a habit. She claimed every destination was twenty minutes away—the world’s longest twenty minutes. Once, when she visited us in Florida, she called to say she would be in Boca Raton in twenty minutes. I asked where she was. She said Orlando, which, without traffic, was about three hours away.
“We can go to Café Joelle. It’s casual American, twenty minutes from here.”
“By foot or by car?” I asked.
“By camel,” Lisa responded, shaking her head testily. Was something going on? “No matter where we are, you always ask how far the restaurant is.”
And you always say twenty minutes, I thought. “I like to know.”
“A good restaurant is worth the drive. Would you prefer sushi? There’s an Asian place we could try. Callie’s crazy for bubble tea.”
“How long a ride?”
“I’d say twenty minutes.”
I bent deep at the knee to sit on the bed, which was too low to the floor. I had considered mentioning it to Lisa the last time I came to stay, but the worst thing a guest can do is complain about the bed their host assigns them to sleep on. Especially if that host is your daughter.
“The bed is lovely, but it needs to be higher. I wonder if the problem is the box spring.”
Lisa threw her hands in the air. “Mom, everyone loves that bed.”
Who’s everyone, I wondered.
“We don’t have to go out. Would you like me to make dinner tonight?” I asked.
“Sure, if you promise not to poison us.”
I wasn’t revered for my cuisine. My own mother could turn a breaded chicken cutlet in a frying pan into something intoxicating, worth laying down your sword for. And Lisa was a professional chef. The culinary talent had skipped a generation.
I gestured for Lisa to sit and patted the quilt that had once belonged to me. Lisa had a habit of taking whatever she liked from my house. And she had liked this quilt. She said it would remind her of me. Nice. Smooth. I knew when I took a shower, I’d probably find my towels on the rack.
“Mom, Brian is out of town because he got promoted this summer—to chair of the department in Boston.”
“ Mazel tov ! Congratulations.” I was pleased to hear Brian had moved up. He’d waited a long while for his time to come. With his PhD in geography in hand, he began as an adjunct. Then he became a professor and attained tenure at the state university. Now this. “Such good news, Lisa. Why didn’t you mention it sooner?”
“I didn’t want to jinx him. It’s quite an advancement.”
“ Kina hora ,” I said, a common Yiddish term often said to ward off the evil eye when something positive happened.
“You remind me of Grandma Frieda when you pop in the Yiddish,” Lisa said, joining me on the bed.
I appreciated it when Lisa brought up my mother. I hoped one day Callie would mention me to her child.
“Do you remember when I first moved to Massachusetts, and I called Bubbe and told her I had bought a new car? She said, ‘ Kina hora ’ and insisted that I tie a red ribbon inside. I knotted one onto the rearview mirror.”
“ Kina hora ,” we said in unison.
“I wish Bubbe had lived to see Macallan,” Lisa said.
I pictured my mom’s face, swallowed a breath. “Me too.”
“Would you like to be called Bubbe instead of Grandma?”
“No, I would just like to be called.”
“That’s a so-you thing to say.”
“And I’d like you to tell me what’s going on.”
“The restaurant gets busier every day. Macallan needs attention. And Brian is hardly here. He teaches in Boston four days a week now. It’s too much to travel back and forth, so he stays in a bedroom in an Airbnb. You know Brian. He doesn’t need much. Before I met him, he camped his way through Europe and slept in a hammock.”
“That was a long time ago, Lisa. When does he see Callie?”
“It’s been fine,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.
Translation: “It’s been fine” meant it wasn’t fine, but I figured Lisa had no choice. Brian couldn’t pass up the position, and she couldn’t move to Boston. She had the restaurant.
“He bought Callie a Gizmo, and he calls her all the time,” she explained.
“I didn’t know Callie had one of those watches. Did you include my number on it?”
Lisa rose up, shook her head. “Sorry, Mom, you didn’t make the cut.”
“What? How much closer than maternal grandma would I have to be ‘to make the cut’?”
“I didn’t mean it that way. The phone reaches a limited number of people, and we had to list the local family in case she ever needs help and one of us isn’t around.”
The local family. Maybe I was wrong and my forlorn husband was right. Maybe we should become local family sooner rather than later. I wanted to be listed on that watch. Was it childish to be jealous of the people saved as contacts? You bet it was. But I didn’t care.
I contemplated my daughter’s new living arrangement. Although I understood several of Lisa’s married friends lived separately for career reasons, I wondered if she was making light of it for my benefit, making nothing of it when it was something. Had he gone to Boston because there was a problem between them?
When the kids were young, I wouldn’t have wanted to be separated from Jake. In June, we’d been married forty-five years. I liked to tease that it was forty-four for me, one for Jake, but the truth was I couldn’t imagine myself without him. What was more, although we argued when we were young, we rarely disagreed anymore. Our parents were gone. Our kids were grown. We had enough money. Parents, children, and money were the things most people disagreed about. Unless there was cheating, which there wasn’t. Jake was the most loyal person—except to his sister, because he believed she killed his mother by bringing her Marlboro Lights and rolling her outside to smoke when she was in the nursing home.
Lisa nudged me and brought me out of my rumination. “Oh, Mom. I forgot to tell you there’s a nature walk at school. Would you like to go with Callie? Totally up to you. Your call. If needed, I can find a stand-in.”
A stand-in? I assumed I was the stand-in. Why was Lisa acting as though she had any choice besides me? Of course I wanted to meet Callie’s school friends, introduce myself to her teacher. Hello, Jodi, I thought to myself. Lisa doesn’t want to ask too much of you. Your daughter is being considerate. She’s no longer the kid she was when you said, “Tomato,” and she said, “I hate you.”
“I’d be happy to go with Callie,” I said.
Lisa said she’d forward me the email about the event she received from the school.
“Okay, I’m going to go check the cupboard to see what I can make for dinner.”
“Mom, be sure to set a place for Annie. She’s joining us.” Had Lisa adopted the babysitter?
“Oh, I attempted to pay her, but she wouldn’t take a penny. I didn’t know what the going rate was for taking care of a child or how long she’d been here, and she wouldn’t tell me.”
“Mom, we don’t pay Annie. She’s like family. She enjoys being here.”
I hugged Lisa as we sat on the bed, hung on for a few moments, inclined to never let go.
“What’s the hug for?” Lisa asked.
“For inviting me here.”
“Mom, you’re always invited. Remember? I invited you in August when Callie had that five-day break after Girls on the Run. I thought you’d be here on the next flight. But you couldn’t make it, so I signed her up for Pioneer People, that day camp that takes place completely outdoors. Remember how you couldn’t believe it? You said, ‘Even in the rain?’”
She was still holding that against me. “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it, but I had a surprise seventieth birthday party for Suzy. She’s my best friend. I had to go—I planned it. And, before you mention it, the time before that, Slivovitz, the new podiatrist, had just joined the practice. Anyway, I’m here now. How was Pioneer People?”
“Callie loved it. She learned serious survival skills. There were no bathrooms. The kids peed outside.”
“Terrific,” I said, recalling that I had sent Lisa to a culturally Jewish upscale sleepaway camp in these very Berkshires, where the kids had waiters at all three meals, and a woman called the Camp Mother washed every child’s hair twice a week. “Remember how much fun you had at camp?”
“Don’t remind me. I hated camp. What I liked was being on my own, away from home. I would have gone to prison to get out of the house.”
“Thanks for cluing me in,” I said. “I had no idea I could have had you arrested and saved my money for something else. Remind me to tell Dad.”
“How’s Dad?” she asked, sounding as though she expected a negative reply.
“He’ll be fine when he hits upon a new way to occupy his time. He’s not the type who’ll be able to sit at home. And obviously he can’t play pickleball. Honestly, I’ve never seen him this distraught when it wasn’t a matter of life and death.”
“Maybe Dad needs a change of location.”
“Do you mean from his recliner to the couch?”
“Have you considered moving here?”
I wondered whether she’d planted a video camera in our living room in Florida and taped my conversation with him. Had she spoken to him about this already? Or was it simply a case of like father, like daughter? “Oh, I’m not ready for that. What would I do if I retired—take longer to eat lunch? I know. I could become a greeter at Walmart. ‘Welcome to Walmart,’” I said, pretending to push over a shopping cart.
“Seriously, Mom, you’re not getting any younger.”
“You noticed!” I was sixty-seven. If I was fortunate and lived another twenty years, I’d be eighty-seven. It was something I’d thought a lot about, the mathematics of how long I’d be alive. And if I happened to survive that long, it raised other questions. For example, would I be a young and vital eighty-seven—still throwing surprise birthday parties for friends—or an old eighty-seven—needing an aide to cut my meat and puree fruit in a blender? I understood what Lisa had in mind. She wanted me to relocate, take up residence, before my walker had tennis balls on the feet and before she had to tip her daughter in cash each time she visited me in the palliative care nursing home because otherwise the kid would have no interest in seeing me. Although Jake and I had often discussed moving, we’d never brought it up to Lisa, and she’d never mentioned it. Why discuss relocation now when we were waiting until old age?
And I wasn’t old. Yet. When I was thirty, I considered a fifty-year-old ancient. I met Eileen, my mother-in-law, when she was in her fifties. She was in a white maillot at her beach club—and I thought she was Methuselah. Before this conversation with Lisa, I had had little idea whether she wanted us in her neck of the woods or if she’d find it an imposition. But here she was, bringing up the idea. That meant she wanted us nearby. We’d be arriving with an invitation. No better feeling than being wanted. Kina hora. But no matter how much I fancied my progeny, no way was I prepared to move to a place where I had no history, materializing out of thin air. To everyone, I’d just be Lisa’s mom, just like I was in the interview with Nicki Nussbaum. As for Jake, his impulsive desire to deploy was based solely on his sudden email from Wake-Up America. For him, at this point, Woodfield seemed like a solution to all his problems.
As I was hoisting myself from the low bed, Callie appeared at the door to the guest room. “Mom, I need you and Grandma Jo to help me build my castle.”
Lisa and I followed her to the living room, where she was playing with the Legos on the coffee table. Lisa jokingly placed bricks where they didn’t belong, and Callie slapped her hand. Soon we were all slapping hands until we knocked the whole thing down.
Callie began again, assembling a castle worthy of King Arthur. Lisa left to run an errand. I checked the refrigerator to see what I could turn into a dinner. What I found was vegan yogurt. Soy, coconut, oat, cashew. Greek yogurt, French yogurt. Kefir-style probiotic drinks. Vodka and cheese in the crisper. Clearly Lisa wasn’t eating—not unusual—but what about Callie?
I told Callie to grab a jacket, and we went for groceries. At the country store, a man behind the register welcomed us. He was broad shouldered and solid, with a craggy, weather-beaten face.
Callie said, “Hi, Arlo. This is my other grandma. The one who doesn’t live here.”
“You sure are a lucky girl having all these grandmas.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said, extending my hand.
Arlo’s store was upscale, catering more to tourists than townspeople. On the outside, it looked like it belonged on one of those black-and-white postcards travelers once bought for twenty cents that were inscribed with “Wish you were here!” even though, in reality, they were ecstatic to be nowhere near you. The cold cases held organic eggs, milk from a nearby farm, meat and chicken and hot dogs from a local butcher. He stocked gluten-free and vegan products. Gifts to bring home—maple syrup, honey, chocolate, baked beans, clam chowder made in Massachusetts. And because it was fall, there were pumpkins, gourds, Indian corn. Also, Arlo sold a lot of wine. And cheese. Pricey, fancy cheese. On a table, he had a display of charcuterie boards. I wondered about the recent rise of charcuterie, which turned out to be what I had previously referred to as olives and salami.
I found what I needed for dinner, overloading on veggies because my children often accused me of preparing starchy meals. Which was true. But I hated to hear about it. Callie couldn’t decide on apple or pumpkin pie for dessert. We took both. Then Callie handed me Oreos, which I added to my basket. “Mom never lets me buy Oreos,” she whispered as though Lisa was within earshot. “I’ll keep them in my room and have two each night.” I’d never been able to stop at a few cookies, but Callie was Lisa’s daughter, so I assumed she had more self-control, less interest in carbohydrates than I had.
Arlo tallied the groceries. “Say hi to Grandma Di,” he said to Callie.
“She’d be mad if she heard you call her that,” Callie said.
He winked at her. “I know. I’m just having a little fun.”
“She’s out of town because she went to see her sister. She said her sister might be dying. She said her sister had no children, a lot of jewelry, and a big house.”
“Right. Her sister in Rhode Island,” Arlo replied. Was he friends with Di? He seemed too docile and down to earth to be buddies with the woman who was the “first name in second homes”—but they do say opposites attract. Historic Woodfield was a small town. Maybe Di shopped in the store, or Arlo ran into her at local events. I couldn’t imagine what they would have in common.
I pictured Di helping her sister rewrite her last wishes, assuring her place in the will.