One True Thing Read online

  “I’m so tired, Gen,” she said quietly, without ever knowing I was there.

  “I know, dear heart,” he replied.

  The next morning my father said the dinner had been a fiasco. “If she were a child she would have been described as playing with her food,” he said, then drained his coffee cup, picked up his book bag, and left for his nine o’clock class before she could come downstairs. Yet when she did come down she was all lit up, dreamy, smiling, with the lines softened around her mouth and on her forehead. And she stayed that way all that day.

  My father, before he went to work, had been merely distracted; his hair was awry, and there was a spot of blood on his collar to match the nick on the underside of his chin. All the lines on his face looked deeper, as though he’d had a bad portrait done, or an unforgiving black-and-white photograph. “What class do you have?” I’d asked as I handed him coffee.

  “Women in Dickens,” he said.

  “Miss Havisham and Estella? Or the wimps, Little Dorrit and Dora and David’s sainted mother?”

  “All,” he said, standing up.

  “What about his wife and his mistress?”

  “Only the work, not the biography,” he said. “Ellen, the buttons have broken on the collars of two of my shirts. I put them on the chair in the bedroom. Could you see that they’re replaced? And I’d rather we had the skim than the whole milk. Or get both and give the whole milk to your mother. Your brothers will be home on Thursday afternoon so they’ll need plenty to eat.”

  “But how can you separate the work from the biography?”

  “What?”

  “Dickens. How can you illuminate the work if you separate the work from the biography?”

  “You know the stock answer to that,” he said, distracted. “The work stands alone. Does the nurse come again soon?”

  “Monday.”

  “Your mother liked her. She said last night that she found her helpful.”

  “She’s good,” I said.

  “The doctor has decided to discontinue the chemotherapy,” my father said.

  “What?”

  “She spoke to your mother the other day at the hospital, when you took her over. She told me last night. Dr. Cohn decided that it’s not having much of an effect.” He went into the hall for his briefcase. “I’ll meet you at seven here for the tree ceremony.”

  “That’s it? That’s all? No more chemo? End of sentence? End of discussion?”

  “What more is there to say?” my father said, and left for work.

  The night they lit the Christmas trees on the green was a perfect night of its kind in Langhorne. In summer there would be those dark nights with a cool breeze blowing faintly and the passing scent of petunias in the air, nights that veered between hot and not so hot so that when you went skinny-dipping in the reservoir you would get out and then jump back in because the water felt warmer than the air.

  In fall there were the sweater days, football days, when the sun shone clear but light yellow, the color of white corn, and as you walked down the street a leaf would pirouette to the sidewalk right before your eyes, almost brushing your nose, and late at night the rumble of the furnace would suddenly shake the house like a snore.

  And spring, what there ever was of it, was all beautiful, the pure smell of wet and fresh and the daffodils sashaying on the green, in our yards, in hidden wild patches on the hillside sloping down to the river amid the damp grass.

  And in winter there were nights like the one when they lit the trees that year, when the sky hung down like black silk punched full of holes so that the bright light behind could shine out in tiny points, thousands of them. The air burnt your tongue a bit with its cold, and the bony fingers of the bare tree branches reached up to lay hands on a full moon. It was bright outdoors, silver-bright, with the long black shadows of shrubs, houses, people walking down the sidewalk and staring up at the moon as though it was moving the tides of their lives and they could feel the ebb and flow inside them.

  Usually on a night like that in Langhorne you’d only know how perfect it was when you went to take the garbage out and were dazzled, or came in late from work or a movie and stopped to marvel. After dark people stayed home in Langhorne, not because there was anything to fear, but because our houses—our kitchens, our dens, our bedrooms—were where our lives took place.

  If a stranger walked the streets, which had never happened in my memory, he would see from the sidewalk one imagined oasis after another of yellow light and easy love: a woman’s head at a kitchen window, her arms moving in slow and steady patterns as she washed dishes; children passing to and fro in their rooms looking for pencils or turning down the stereo on command; men dozing in big comfortable chairs. Outside on the cold streets you would see no one, except perhaps some child walking home from a friend’s house after working on a school project, the pyramids in papier-mâché, a disquisition on Romeo and Juliet and family discord. You would hear nothing except for the faint sounds from within those houses, of piano practice and the water running and the commentators from Wide World of Sports.

  But the night they lit the trees was different. Whole families, their collars turned up against, not the cold, but the idea of cold, of how cold it ought to be in the shadow of Christmas, came down the street to the green. From inside our house we could hear the murmur of their voices outside, a drone like that of bees around the hydrangea bushes on one of the perfect summer days.

  My mother was upstairs getting dressed, and I was packing a bag with her pills, extra gloves, and four Christmas ornaments that we had not put on her tree, just in case, she said, although it was hard to tell what “in case” meant. She’d put on an old pair of wool slacks, cinched tightly under a red turtleneck and the red sweater with reindeer leaping across it that she wore every year to the tree ceremony. She came down the stairs slowly, holding tightly to the banister, then settled herself in her chair and pulled her beret over what little was left of her hair.

  “No coat?” said my father.

  “I don’t need a coat,” she said. “I’m layered. Besides, I want to show off my sweater.”

  I was wearing red, too, and my father a green loden coat, and together we made a festive group, with our beribboned wheelchair. My father pushed the chair and I walked alongside. The moon touched the handles and made silver pools of its own reflection. My mother tipped her head back to look up.

  “Beautiful night,” she said softly.

  The road around the green was packed with people, the crowd so large that some stood on the streets that fanned out from the hub. But we were able to push right through because my mother and the other Minnies were given a place at the front, next to the podium from which the mayor gave the signal to light the trees.

  “Hey, Mrs. Gulden?” said Hetty Belknap, who for all her childhood had been known as Hugh and Sophie Belknap’s change-of-life baby, a scrawny little girl with freckles and sandy hair that looked as if she’d cut it herself, perhaps with manicure scissors.

  “What, sweetie?” my mother said.

  “I like how you decorated your wheels,” she said, and her father gave her a stern look. “I didn’t say anything about her being sick,” Hetty whined as he led her away.

  “Hey, Ellen,” said a young police officer keeping the crowd back, whose name I couldn’t quite recall until months later when I saw him at the municipal building.

  “Well, how are you?” I said brightly. “Look at you in your uniform.”

  “Ellen’s imitating me, Gen,” said my mother, giving me a wink.

  The Presbyterian choir stood in their red robes with songbooks under their arms, and Amanda Bollan, who’d been in Honor Society with me, waved and then turned to say something to the woman next to her.

  “Is Brian home yet?” one slender girl with fur earmuffs asked me, ducking her head.

  The mayor shook hands with us all. So did Mr. Best, wearing one of his MAY THE BEST MAN WIN hats.

  “Linda says you gave her good
advice on her tree,” he said to my mother.

  “Oh, Ed, she didn’t need it,” my mother replied.

  “You’re looking well,” he added. “And you, too, Ellen.”

  The Minnies usually stood in a semicircle behind the podium, but this year they grouped themselves around my mother’s wheelchair. The mayor read their names amid the sounds of mothers ssshusshing their children and one little girl wailing loudly, the sound fading, like an ambulance turning a corner, as she was carried away into darkness.

  I’d been a little girl here once, riding on my father’s shoulders, clutching at his hair while my mother held Jeffrey awkwardly against her hip, to one side of her bulging stomach. The year she had first been a Minnie I had looked every morning in the basket in the hallway to see what she’d made for her tree the night before. But I’d never helped decorate before that morning. She’d never asked. I’d never offered.

  “Happy holidays, Langhorne,” the mayor said, a change from the “Merry Christmas” of years gone by because of the complaints of a Jewish professor of economics at the college that had occupied page one of the Tribune for a week two Januaries before. He raised his hand and the trees came alive, sparks leaping from amid their branches, the sequins on my mother’s tree winking red and gold. The crowd burst into applause and the choir began to sing.

  There was a moment of silence as the last deep sonorous note of “Silent Night” died away. My father’s eyes were fixed on my mother; his lips were held together tightly, one to the other, but when she looked over, he smiled broadly.

  “Which one did she do?” he asked, as though the tables and countertops of his home had not been littered with sequined ornaments for weeks.

  “Third from the left,” I whispered, smelling the lemon of his cologne and the musty wool of his coat. “Papa smells,” I called them when I was a little girl, along with the smells of shoe polish and leather shoes.

  “I suspected as much,” he said.

  The choir bounced through “Deck the Halls,” their consonants as sharp as could be, punctuated with little white bursts of warm breath on the cold night. The Minnies hugged one another, and the mayor thanked them, and the crowd surged forward to look at each tree closely. For a moment I lost sight of my mother as she disappeared amid a circle of neighbors. The young cop smiled across their heads at me, then turned away, his pale face a moon above the children pushing through the crowd to find their friends.

  “Are you Ellen?” said a woman with blond hair held back from a high forehead with a red velvet band dotted with silk holly leaves and sequined berries. She had on a black wool cape that swung open when she moved. She was very pregnant.

  “I’m Halley McPherson,” she said, shaking my hand. “We just moved here from Atlanta. My husband is comptroller at the college. This is such a nice thing, isn’t it?”

  “It is, but it must seem sort of small town after Atlanta.”

  “Well, everything really is small town, anyhow, isn’t it? My husband always says there are no big ponds. Although your mom says you’re a New Yorker, so maybe you wouldn’t agree.”

  I smiled noncommittally. I didn’t.

  “Well, I just wanted to meet you because your mother has been such a saint to me. I told the man at the hardware store that I was looking for a decorating book to do the baby’s nursery and he said that I didn’t need a decorating book if I talked to your mom.”

  “Oh, you’re the crib person. How’d it turn out?”

  “It’s beautiful. Nobody can believe I did it myself.”

  The crowd around us moved aside and there was my father, pushing the wheelchair. My mother smiled and put out her hand.

  “Oh Halley, there you are in person.” She looked down at Halley’s midsection. “You look wonderful.”

  “Fecund,” said my father.

  “I’m due a week from Friday,” Halley said.

  “Mama, how did you know it was her?” I said.

  “She talked me through making the headband, too,” Halley said, raising her hand to her hair. “That’s how she was going to recognize me. And soon she’s coming to see the crib.”

  “Very soon,” my mother said.

  As we walked back up the hill, children eddying around us, adults calling greetings across the street to all three of us, my mother looked up at the moon again and said, “I do love Christmas. It’s always been my favorite holiday. I used to decorate the whole apartment with construction-paper things when I was little.” She took my hand as we walked. “Ellen, we need to get a tree,” she said.

  “No, no,” I cried, and people turned around to look. “Please, Lord, not another tree to decorate. Let this cup pass from me.”

  “Just one more,” my mother said, laughing. “Only eight feet tall or it won’t fit in the living room.”

  “One more,” I said. “That’s my limit.”

  “And the boys will be home in two days, and we’ll have ham for Christmas dinner. Much easier than turkey.”

  “Turkey wasn’t so bad.”

  “And it’s good to know how to make a turkey, just in case.”

  “In case of what?”

  “Oh, you,” my mother said.

  “The Gulden tree was the most beautiful one,” my father said.

  “I know,” said my mother.

  The moon was as perfect and bright as a dime, and from some of the houses bits of colored lights shone out, the lights on Christmas trees whose outlines were lost in the dark of sleeping houses, empty houses, houses whose people were still winding their way up the hill. There was a slight wind, and the outdoor evergreens made a sound like hands rubbing softly together.

  My mother shivered. “You’re cold,” said my father sternly. “You ought to have worn a coat.”

  “I’m not cold,” my mother said.

  A little boy in a red cap pulled low ran past us, crying “Mommy!” and faintly, from the bottom of the hill we could hear a group of people singing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” in stops and starts, searching aloud for the words.

  “I love Christmas,” my mother said with a sigh.

  My father leaned down so that his head was close to hers. “And Easter,” he said. “I have it on good authority that Easter comes early this year. Very early. And that nice young woman will surely need you to teach her how to paint eggs or weave baskets.”

  My mother put her hand to my father’s cheek, and then she looked up again at the moon. “No, Gen,” she said. “Easter was never my holiday. To hell with Easter.”

  The second time Teresa came to the house Jeffrey and Brian were home from school. They had climbed out of Jeff’s leaky jeep sopping wet, caught in one of those dreadful soaking winter rainstorms just outside of Philadelphia but determined to make it home for dinner. Our mother was asleep upstairs when they first arrived; the night after the tree lighting she had woken up crying with pain soon after she went to bed and then had woken again, after I gave her more morphine, weeping incoherently about the babies and a thunderstorm and a tree splitting in the front yard and falling on the house. I stood in the doorway of their room while my father tried to calm her, undone by her blank eyes and senseless rant. He held her arms and repeated, “You are having a nightmare, Kate. It is a nightmare. A nightmare. There is no storm. There are no babies.”

  “No babies,” she said.

  “No.”

  “I’m here, Mama,” I said.

  “A nightmare,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  Finally he eased her back and pulled the covers around her shoulders. Like a light turned off, her lids went down and she began to breathe heavily, as though she had a bad cold. My father got out of bed in his boxer shorts. While I looked away, leaning against the doorjamb, he pulled on last night’s pants and shirt.

  “I cannot sleep after that,” he said. “Are hallucinations a side effect of the medication?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What if they are? I’d rather have her hallucinating comfortably than suffer
ing from the pain.”

  “I’m not suggesting that she should suffer. I’m suggesting that we should not administer medication without knowing all its side effects.”

  “Oh, Papa, who gives a shit? Who gives a shit if it makes her skin turn purple and blood come out her nose if it stops her from hurting? This is not an intellectual exercise. This is day-to-day let’s get through this.”

  “Just ask the doctor,” he said, going downstairs.

  “You ask her,” I said.

  But instead I asked Teresa when she arrived with her bag. Jeff had been out with his high school friends until nearly dawn, and he was in the kitchen in bare feet and running shorts when the bell rang.

  “My public,” he said, holding a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in his fist and throwing open the door.

  “It’s Teresa,” I said, looking over his shoulder. “Come in, Teresa. She’s upstairs and the area around her catheter seems a little red. She was hoping you would look at it and at some lumps she has on her sides.”

  “Certainly,” Teresa said as Jeff held the door and watched her pass. She laid her coat over one of the wing chairs in the living room, took the small pouch from her duffel bag and went upstairs. In a moment I heard her call, “Rise and shine.”

  “Give me a clue,” Jeff said.

  “The nurse.”

  “The nurse?”

  “I told you. Dr. Cohn wanted to send a nurse once a week. That’s her. Teresa Guerrero.”

  “Teresa?”

  “Jeffie, hon, I have a floor to wash and three loads of laundry. Dr. Cohn sent a nurse, her name is Teresa Guerrero, and I too have noticed that she is extremely young and attractive.”

  “When you said a nurse I pictured someone who looked like a dinner roll. Round. White. Fluffy. Comforting.”

  “Well, this is what you get instead.”

  “My stars,” said Jeff, eating his sandwich. “Sakes alive. Well I’ll be.”

  Before Teresa came downstairs Jeff had put on a pair of jeans and a rugby shirt. “Even shoes,” I said. “My stars.”

  “Put a sock in it, Ellie,” my brother said.