When Skateboards Will Be Free (27 page)

I will tell the dean’s office there’s been a misunderstanding, that’s all. Nothing to worry about. My mother will be at work tomorrow. First thing tomorrow, I promise.

“Hello,” I said. I could hear the shaking in my voice.

“Hello, Saïd,” Saïd the person on the other end. “My name is Barbara. We’ve never met, but I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m your mother’s therapist. How is she doing?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think she’s sick, but I don’t know.”

“Can you put her on the phone for me?”

I pulled the phone over to her bed and put it to my mother’s ear. “It’s for you, Ma.”

My mother took it with a spongy hand. “Yes,” she said.

I went into the bathroom, but when I closed the door I
heard the phone ringing again. Was she going to answer it? No, she was back asleep, in the same position, as if nothing had happened.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” said Barbara. Her voice urgent now. “I think your mother might have taken all of her medication. I’m sure she’s going to be fine, but I need you to bring her in so we can take a look at her. Can you do that?”

“I can do that,” I said.

She gave me the address. “I’ll see you soon,” she said.

I needed to call someone to drive us but I didn’t know anyone to call, so I took out the phone book. It was heavy and sloppy in my hands. I’d never called a taxi before. I looked up the number. I dialed.

“We have to go, Ma,” I said. “We have to go see your doctor.”

I pulled the covers away. Her body looked swollen and wet.

“Can you get dressed, Ma?”

She groaned in protest but roused herself as if moving through clay. She sat on the edge of the bed in her T-shirt and underwear, blinking her eyes.

“We have to hurry, Ma.” I took a pair of pants out of her dresser. “Can you put these on?”

She took them from me in slow motion and stood uneasily, teetering.

I bent down and lifted her legs, one at a time. Then I found a sweater and a pair of socks. When she was fully dressed, I went into my bedroom and took out thirty dollars from my drawer. It was all I had. When I returned to the
living room, my mother was standing by her bed, holding a glass of water and a bottle of pills, drinking and swallowing. I snatched the bottle from her and put it in my pocket. She looked at me with disinterest. I had the urge to slap her face. My hand tingled with the sensation of it.

I brought her shoes to her, and she sat on the kitchen chair while I knelt down and put them on and tied them. Then we left the apartment. Her small, frail body leaned against me, yielding as I helped her down the stairs, two flights, past the basement door, past the letters in the mailbox, out into the sunshine. On the stoop we waited for the taxi, and after about a minute she folded over and lay on the concrete steps like a drunk woman. Two pretty girls walked by and looked at us.

The taxi arrived, and the driver came around and helped me get my mother inside.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it.”

The ride was surprisingly short. Ten minutes, maybe. When we got to the doctor’s office the driver pulled alongside the curb. My mother had fallen asleep again.

“Wake up, Ma.”

She woke and looked at me. The driver helped lift her from beneath her armpits.

“I can manage,” she said sharply.

I handed him ten dollars and he took it.

Then we caught an elevator up some flights where Barbara stood waiting for us. “I’m sure it’s been quite a day for you,” she said to me. Her face matched her voice, composed, almost serene, framed by gray-blond hair.

We went into a room with a nurse dressed in white clothes. Barbara shut the door. My mother sat down in a chair and I sat beside her.

“How many pills did you take, Martha?”

“I don’t care,” my mother said.

I dug the bottle out of my pocket and handed it to Barbara. She opened it and looked at it for a moment. Then she closed it.

“Can you tell me what’s going on, Martha?” she said.

The nurse started checking my mother’s blood pressure.

“I don’t want you to go,” my mother said. Her voice cracked and she began to cry.

“Your mother has grown very attached to me,” Barbara said. “I’ve decided to take a job in Virginia and this has upset her, as you can see.”

A man with a tie entered. “I’m Dr. so-and-so,” he said.

“He’s a psychologist too, Martha,” Barbara said. “I’ve asked him to come and have a look at you.”

The man smiled at me.

“Are we going to have to commit you, Martha?” Barbara asked. “Is that what we’re going to have to do?”

“I don’t want you to go,” my mother said again. Now the tears were coming harder, her mouth open, gasping for air. “I don’t want you to leave.”

“I need to know you’re not going to try to kill yourself,” Barbara said with the even tone. “Can you tell me that? Can you look at me and tell me that?”

“I don’t want you to go,” my mother said again. Her voice had the sound of a child’s in it, and instantly I understood
what was going on. This was the “friend” who had asked that question, “Have you ever thought about what you would do with all your free time if you left the party?” When had my mother ever spoken of a friend before? My mother had no friends. Had she ever had friends? Maybe there had been one or two in Brooklyn, but that was years ago, and after that there had been only comrades—and comrades weren’t friends, they were something else, something deeper, something better. But this woman dressed in her slacks and jacket, looking like a businesswoman, was a
friend.
A friend who had helped my mother to leave the party. And now this friend was leaving too.

“I don’t want to live!” my mother said suddenly. “I don’t want to live anymore!”

“Don’t say that, Ma,” I said. “Don’t ever say that!”

And now I was crying. The tears choking me in their haste to get out, running out of my face, dripping down my cheeks.

“I don’t want to live,” she said again.

“No, Ma!”

The nurse had stepped to the side now.

“What about your son?” the doctor asked. “Have you thought about what will happen to your son?”

“He’ll be fine,” my mother said, as if she had come to that conclusion a long time ago and was at peace with it.

“He doesn’t look like he’ll be fine,” the doctor said.

And that is where we sat that evening in November, my mother and I in that doctor’s office, both of us sobbing beneath a hard light, surrounded by all things white and stainless,
as two doctors who were not dressed like doctors stared down at my mother with a mixture of impatience and pity, and a nurse waited nearby, and my mother, between gasps of breath, repeated again and again as if it were a mantra that would never find an end: “I don’t want to live! I don’t want to live! I don’t want to live!”

T
HE SUNSHINE WAKES ME, THIN
rays of light coming through the blinds. I was dreaming something, but I can’t remember what it was. For a while I lie on my back and stare up at the ceiling, thinking about nothing. There are no sounds except the occasional howl of the winter wind.
Whooo. Whooo.
I pull the blanket over my shoulders so that only my face is visible. The blanket is thick and heavy and it presses down on my body as if it might be alive. I love this blanket and do what I can to use it in all seasons. On some spring or summer nights, even when there is no need, I will run the air-conditioning so that I have no choice but to sleep beneath it.

I roll over and look at Karen. Around her face and pillow, dark curls fall. There is no sign that she will wake anytime soon. Given the option, she would sleep all day if she could. I once witnessed her sleep twelve hours straight and still rise with regret. That’s how she was as a baby, her mom and dad have told me. The photographs I have seen of her slumbering in her crib appear to bear that out. A chubby little girl on her belly with her mouth half open.

We’ve begun tentatively discussing the idea of moving in together. Wouldn’t it be nice, we sometimes muse, to never have to pack a bag again to spend the night, to never have to say good-bye, to never have to be alone? Ever again. Yes,
we say, it would be nice. But still the concept is fraught with what seems to me an intractable dilemma: I am loath to give up this small sanctuary I have carved out for myself on Jane Street. “I have an idea,” I will offer at strategic moments. “Just move in with me here.” And she will say, “No! It’s just one room!” And then I will counter with a grand architectural vision that includes building a wall to cut the apartment in half. “No!” Just a few weeks ago, on a lark, we went with a realtor to look at a place on West Twelfth Street. It was dark, dirty, and three thousand dollars a month. There was also a horrible smell emanating, we feared, from somewhere inside the walls. The realtor blabbered on about the ample closet space while I moped, offered no constructive suggestions, and left feeling as if I might be coming down with something. “Don’t worry,” Karen consoled afterward, “we’ll find something wonderful. You’ll see.” And I said, thinking that perhaps her defenses had been softened, “I have an idea …”

But I know she’s right. Two people in one room is untenable. And one day, when we find a spacious apartment that is clean and beautiful, I will give up my sanctuary. And we’ll move in together and we’ll be happy together.

In the meantime, however, the thin rays of sunshine have grown stronger, yellower. And no matter how much I don’t want to disturb her, it’s time for us to get up and get going.

“Candy,” I whisper. “Time to wake up, Candy.”

She stirs and opens her eyes.

The subway is almost completely filled when we get on. I spy two vacant seats in the corner and I rudely hurry my way to them. Karen drapes her leg over mine as the doors close and the subway begins to hurtle onward at a ferocious clip. But the instant we reach the dark tunnel it slows, it crawls, and then it stops completely. A moment later the intercom clicks on and the conductor says, “Attention, ladies and gentlemen …” but what we should be attentive to is garbled and unintelligible. “What’s he saying?” I say to Karen. Karen shrugs. By the looks of it, all the passengers have long ago resigned themselves to a slow and tedious trek uptown. We must resign ourselves too. The train chugs ahead to Twenty-third Street, then Twenty-eighth, then Thirty-third, doing in twenty minutes what should take five. I regret not having brought something to read. “We should have brought something to read,” I say to Karen. There is a touch of reproach in my voice. Everyone else seems to have had the foresight. Around us, heads are buried in Bibles, novels, and newspapers, all in a variety of languages. Nearby is an elderly man dressed in a shabby suit and completely absorbed in a supermarket circular. Next to him is a mother halfway through a romance novel, her young son lying splayed across her lap, deep in sleep. Karen and I must pass the time by entertaining ourselves with the advertisements above our heads. We are particularly amused by the one where a doctor in a lab coat tells us of a fast and easy surgical procedure to remove all pimples, moles, and birthmarks. Ow, my leg has fallen asleep beneath Karen’s. “Sorry!” she says. I drape it over hers. “Ow!” she says. “Your leg is too heavy!”

Finally we arrive at Eighty-sixth Street, where we gratefully make our exit. As we climb the stairs to the outside world, a crowd of people descends toward us, rushing headlong like tourists who realize their cruise ship is pulling away from shore. Karen and I are separated, jostled from side to side. Aboveground, the winter sunshine is brilliant and for a moment I lose sight of her. “Over here,” she calls. We clasp hands and stand together on the corner, trying to orient ourselves as to which way is which. “I think it’s this way,” she says. “No,” I say, “it’s this way.” Everything is suddenly familiar again: the coffee shop, the newsstand, the grocery store. This is the subway stop I would use when I lived up here on East Eighty-third Street. That is, I would use it when it was too snowy or rainy to ride my bicycle eighty-three blocks down to my part-time job on Houston Street. And then, four hours later, eighty-three blocks back up. I was twenty-four years old and had just arrived after wasting years in Pittsburgh thinking I could be an actor there. The most I could afford in Manhattan was a run-down, illegal sublet that had a claw-foot bathtub in the living room and a hole in the kitchen floor through which I could see the basement. On the first of every month I’d go to the post office and purchase a money order for four hundred two dollars and forge the name Linda O’Connor, who was the tenant of record. All my friends told me the apartment was a steal, that I was lucky to have it, and that I’d never find anything as good. At night I’d fall asleep petrified by the prospect that I was going to be woken by the landlord pounding on the door. I figured I’d have to live there until I hit it big with my
acting career, but two years later I landed my miraculous deal with the New York City Department of Housing and packed up all my possessions and moved to Jane Street. And two years after that I got my job at Martha Stewart, making more money than I had ever made before. And not long after that a woman named Karen was hired.