Chapter Twenty-Three
Hanukkah was late that year. Almost Christmastime.
No snow, of course, but it started dropping into the forties at night, which is what passes for yuletide around here.
Vista View, however, was a winter wonderland.
Every windowpane was snow-dusted. Every horizontal surface dangled icicles.
There was a tree outside the elevator on each floor decorated with lights and candy canes and colored glass balls, mounds of felt snow around their bases.
December is a good month to be old and especially to be old in Texas.
There was no ice to slip on, no walk to shovel, no polar wind to stiffen our joints.
But there were lovely long to-do lists of the sort grandparents suit up for—gifts to buy and wrap, cookies to bake and decorate, winter concerts to attend at grandkids’ schools.
Families came to fetch their loved ones home for a few days.
Children and grandchildren visited from far-off lands.
Outside, the horde didn’t disappear, but it thinned a little, for even the paparazzi had families and festive obligations.
Father Frank came back, not to bring dinner—though he did drop off more cookies—but to lead an interfaith service.
In the tradition of Jews all over the diaspora, I skipped it and ordered Chinese food instead, and Moth, Maisie, and Dot came over to watch cheesy Christmas movies.
Dot managed only half a bowl of wonton soup before declaring herself full.
Maisie and I exchanged worried glances over fried rice.
But it was cozy and suitably festive: candlelit, good-smelling, companionable.
“What a lovely evening,” Dot sighed. “My last Christmas.”
Even by candlelight, I could see Maisie pale. “Don’t say that,” she chided.
“I won’t if it makes you feel better,” Dot agreed amiably, “but it’ll still be true.”
“Who knows what the new year will hold?” Moth pussyfooted. “This one has certainly been unpredictable.”
“I mostly don’t mind not finding out,” Dot said. “Not really. You can’t live till all life’s mysteries are solved, but even if you could, you wouldn’t choose to. What kind of life would that be? And you have to bow out some time.”
“Not yet,” said Maisie.
But Dot wasn’t finished. “I do, however, wish I were going to meet the pupacorn.”
“Pupacorn?” everyone said.
“The baby,” she explained. And when we all continued to look at her blankly and slightly alarmed, she added, “A pupa is a larval moth. A corn is a larval pepper. Pupacorn.” She nodded at me.
At my middle. There was nothing there to see, but I could feel a firming, a tightening maybe, under my fingers.
I did not say there might not be a pupacorn—I had stopped believing this.
I did not say surely Dot would still be here twenty-eight weeks from now—I had stopped believing that too.
I did not say remission from cancer was far more likely, if one were laying odds, than being pregnant at seventy-seven.
I did not say anything because I did not know what to say.
Before this conversation, we had all been feeling pleasantly tired and generically celebratory and suffused with the joy of the season—holy, I guess you’d call it—and I wanted to get back there.
But I also knew Dot was right. Sometimes people with cancer get better, but usually not eighty-nine-year-olds.
Sometimes aging is a creep but only in one direction.
Sometimes aging is a creep but only until it’s a trot but only until it’s a free fall.
And only in one direction. We knew this.
We all knew this. It was one of the best things about Vista View.
Your doctors, your children, your newspaper, the guy who cut your hair, strangers in line at the grocery store all said things like “You’ll feel better soon!
” and “Try this pill/tea/app/physical therapy. It worked for me!” and “Chin up! It’ll be over before you know it.
” It would, but not in the way they meant.
Here, we knew in what way it would be over before we knew it.
We did not comfort one another with cheerful delusions, and that was a comfort. (Irony.)
I walked across the room to Dot and hugged her.
I bit my lip hard to keep from crying because a few delicate tears would have been fine, but what was building was robe-rending sobs, an event horizon of weeping.
Then I felt Maisie’s arms around us both.
Then Moth’s on top of those. And all at once—thankfully, blessedly—the group hug felt silly, our mood self-indulgently maudlin, and we got giggly instead of weepy.
We laughed until we couldn’t catch our breaths.
We laughed until we were all in tears, but not the kind that never stop.
Eventually we got ahold of ourselves and wiped our eyes and said our good-nights, and everyone went home. Even Moth.
Alone in my apartment then, I had a small commemoration of my own, not a celebration quite but an observation of a moment: the end of the first trimester, the start of the second, the likelihood that it didn’t matter what I believed or what odds I laid, it seemed like this pupacorn would stay, like the new year would hold wonders, like what came next would be beyond our imagining.
It was owing, I think, to the magic of the season, and not my own inflated ego, that I found myself reflecting, despite a great many years of Hebrew school, on Mary, the only person I’d ever heard of with a pregnancy more miraculous and improbable than mine.
How scared she must have been, how torn between confusion and joy, how beleaguered by the attentions of everyone in the world and exhausted by all their ill-informed, unsought opinions which had nothing, really, to do with her and her family.
How it must have taken time to believe that what was happening was happening, even in the face of mounting evidence.
How it must have taken time to get her head around it all.
How deep-down proud she must have felt once she did.
Dot held her own through the holidays, but come January, she was all of a sudden very sick.
It was hard to pinpoint quite where it started.
Of course she’d been sick for a while. But suddenly she was something else altogether.
You’d still say “sick” but in a different tone of voice.
You might say “dying,” but you didn’t want to say that word aloud, and it’s not like you can pinpoint the start of that either.
Just like everyone, Dot had been doing that all along.
She began not just shrinking but disheveling.
On someone else, you might not have noticed, but Dot was always so put together.
Now her hair was unbrushed, her makeup smeared, one earring in, one missing in action.
She wore sweatpants to dinner, the same sweatpants night after night.
She cracked her glasses somehow and had to wear an older, weaker pair and limp around with one hand on a new cane, the other out in front of her, feeling her way.
“What the hell is going on with you?” Maisie demanded the night Dot dribbled half a pudding cup down her sweatshirt. At least the slimy cold got her to sit up straight. Dot’s good posture had been lowering slowly like the water level in a clogged bathtub.
“Thick fingers.” Dot’s were fumbling about in her bra for the pudding. “Can’t work them right anymore.”
“That explains the sloppy eating maybe but not the sloppy outfits, the sloppy makeup, the sloppy hair,” Maisie enumerated.
“It is not ladylike”—Dot looked up from her cleavage—“to bring up such deficiencies in polite company.”
“When has Maisie ever been ladylike?” I said.
“When has this company ever been polite?” said Moth.
“You look like shit,” Maisie said.
“What she means,” I translated, “is we’re worried about you. You’re always so elegant and well turned out. These last few weeks there’s been …”
“Unraveling,” Dot supplied.
“Yes,” I agreed gently.
“I’m dying.” Dot shrugged. “What can you do?”
She meant it rhetorically. She meant nothing, there was nothing anyone could do.
But Maisie wasn’t having it. “Drugs?”
I know I said at Vista View we did not dismiss one another’s aches and pains with false optimism, but Maisie wasn’t ready yet.
“Drugs don’t work,” Dot said. “I’ve tried them all.”
“Not the legal ones. The illegal ones. Pot. Shrooms. LCD.”
“That’s computer screens,” Moth advised.
“Men.” Maisie rolled her eyes. “Whatever you’re talking about, they always come back to technology.”
Dot shook her head. “A new computer doesn’t make sense. I won’t live long enough. I’m too old for new technology.”
“I wasn’t recommending a new computer,” said Moth. “Just pointing out ‘LCD’ wasn’t what Maisie meant.”
“Oh you don’t know what I meant,” Maisie snapped. Tempers were running short as Astroturf.
“I don’t want to start experimenting with drugs either,” Dot said.
“What’s the worst that can happen?” said Maisie.
Which Dot ignored. “But you know what I do want?”
Anything. I’d have joyfully granted her anything.
“A baby shower.”
Well, maybe not joyfully.