THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 49
H
er mother had been a beauty,
a green-eyed blonde who wore
a long braid down her back
in high school and then college (Vas-
sar ’57), in New York (Katie Gibbs ’58),
and her job in the typing pool at Wes-
tinghouse, before she was asked (ac-
tually, told) to adopt the more stylish
updos of the time. She refused, her
boss accusing her of hysteria though
the origin of the word (do you know
this?) is the once-belief that the uterus
could reach up its bloody hands and
grip the throat.
Constance addresses the mostly si-
lent women, many from her depart-
ment, who have gathered in the Ant-
lers Bar on Elm, near the Loop, for the
new Storytelling Wednesdays, the au-
dience’s silence not silence but agitated,
bored distraction as Constance closes
with a recitation of her mother’s to-do
list, one of many she found among her
mother’s things last spring upon her
passing, she’s explained. Cirrhosis of
the liver, but that’s another story.
This list was picked at random from
a drawer in the condo’s kitchenette, her
mother in one of those retirement com-
munities haunted by women and men
at the end stage, although who ever
saw the men? The men were parked in
different hallways—narrow, wallpa-
pered corridors lined with orchids, Con-
stance says, miles and miles of orchids,
she continues, the wallpapered walls
hung with Wyeth and Rockwell and
Turner prints, the corridors labyrin-
thine, windowless. I was always lost,
she tells the silent women. They gave
me three weeks to clear everything out.
Presto pronto. Goodwill, hello. No con-
dolences from the staff. And these lists.
Everywhere: on the backs of envelopes
and cardboard coasters, pharmaceuti-
cal notepads, Post-its in different col-
ors and scraps of watercolor paper, she
likes to paint, liked to paint, and, any-
way, everything. So much to do. Lists
and lists.
The crowd’s silence is the same
weight she senses in class sometimes
when she wanders to a different topic,
or at a dinner table when she’s had too
much wine.
“I call it,” she says, clearing her
throat, “‘To Do.’ ” She adds, “I hope
everyone will get the picture,” as some-
one scrapes her chair back and an-
gles toward the bathroom. The others
watch the woman’s progress, riveted.
- A few performers later, Beth, Con-
stance’s colleague, stands bare-chested,
center stage, spoons balanced on her
nipples, her medium essentially visual,
she had said by way of introduction.
We would do it at football parties. It
was a thing. And here a visual reimag-
ining of my lost youth, she concluded,
unbuttoning. Now she kills the same
crowd, the women wildly applauding
as Beth looks up, her face flushed even
from this distance or perhaps it’s the
lights: they flood the makeshift stage,
flood Beth, the glare of them casting
her as something other, something more.
Is she wearing face paint? Has she
grown a third eye? One silver spoon
drops to the floor and the crowd, col-
lectively, gasps.
Her mother’s To Do list went some-
thing like this: bleach; yarn; Q-tips?;
blueberries?; call Constance; organize
girls; ask William. Constance had read
each item slowly, deliberately, clarify-
ing a few details—William her mother’s
ex-husband, Constance’s father, long
deceased, “girls” she and her younger
sister, Sally, she supposed—all the while
onstage thinking, What was I think-
ing? What was I thinking?
Her performance had lasted no more
than a few minutes but the weight so-
lidified into a rock you might split open
with a hammer and chisel.
It all had to do with saying some-
thing, Constance told herself, with con-
tinuity and mothers, lists and identity.
In short: are we the sum of what we’ve
crossed off? Or are we only what we
still have left to do? Her mother’s death
wasn’t the point. People died every week
at that place, every day of the year. Moth-
ers. Fathers. In her mother’s retirement
community, they printed—embossed—
the names of the newly dead on ivory
card stock each morning and propped
the card as if it were a menu on a tiny
easel outside the dining room. Dinner
specials, her mother called them. Death
du jour.
When Constance used to visit, which
she’d done less often than she would like
to admit, she steered her mother clear
of the easel and wheeled her straight to
the employee who manned the dining-
room door. “We have a standing reser-
vation,” her mother would say, a joke, or,
coquettishly, “Table for two.” And they
would laugh and laugh.
Now Constance gestures to the
waitress for another drink; she wants
it quickly before the loudly applauded
Beth returns from the stage, although
Beth appears to be going nowhere, the
audience whistling as if to summon
dogs. Earlier Beth had ordered a green
tea and warm quinoa with kale. Pro-
tein and grains, she explained, and no
to wine, thanks—one glass will make
her fuzzy-headed in the morning and
Beth wants none of that, she’s having
none of that, apparently. She had smiled.
Sorry, she said. I’m a boring date.
Where is camaraderie? Constance
wants to know. What happened to
camaraderie? To nights out? To bond-
ing? To drunkenness? All these young
women so lean and muscular and ac-
complished at thirty; Ivy Leagued, Bra-
zilian-waxed, thonged, tattooed. She
pictures her little sister, Sally, thonged,
tattooed, bending down to wipe the
chin of one of her numerous children.
Tattooed! Sally! Jesus!
- Antlers is a university bar, odd for down-
town, off the Loop with its streets of
neon pizza establishments and old Pol-
ish restaurants, marble-floored, near-
embalmed waiters, odd so close to the
lake, where on certain nights, such as
this one, the wind tunnels down Sher-
idan, up Oak, pummelling the glass-
wrapped new condos and bending the
spindly sycamores planted in tree boxes
on Oak, and Willow, and Maple until
they nearly snap. Here Antlers’ many-
mullioned windows seem oblivious of
weather, the glass plastered with peel-
ing team mascots and political stick-
ers, the walls dense with important
persons in black-and-white, most al-
ready forgotten, their capped smiles
wide and white, their hair styles reflect-
ing each decade: a visual medium.
A severed head of an elk, the bar’s in-
spiration, its dark eyes dulled, its fur
patchy and antlers obscene, stares down
from the end of the narrow hallway to
the bathrooms. The bar decidedly male
and unaccustomed to such a throng of
