THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022 51She and the father left the park and
went into a nearby café, where it wasn’t
so windy, while Tom, Jr., went back to
work. “So,” Thomas said, as they set-
tled themselves in a corner booth with
two coffees. “Have you decided, upon
meeting my son, that you still prefer
me? It was wise of you to get that out
of the way.”
“I do prefer you,” she said. “Your son
has none of your manners or grace or the
very calmness I appreciate about you.”
“No, he does not,” the father said.
“I don’t like to say it, but he’s a bit of
a disappointment. I named him after
myself, hoping he would take on some
of my qualities, but he’s like his mother
all the way.”
“Pearl?”
“Yes, but it was nice on Pearl—it was
earned. She had a hard life. She had a
right to be how she was. Tom, Jr., has
had an easy life; he just adopted her
mannerisms. His attitude has no basis.
It’s based in nothing: it is just imita-
tion. And anything that is imitation, or
based in imitation, is bound to be re-
pellent. People who are themselves arenice to be around, even if they are sour,
like Pearl was.”
“How do you know Pearl wasn’t
imitating?”
He refused to answer, because Pearl
was the woman he had loved more than
anyone in the world, and he wasn’t about
to give away all that he knew about her:
he knew things about her that he would
never tell Angela. And, in fact, he recon-
sidered in that moment calling Angela
Pearl, feeling for the first time that it
was inappropriate, even if it helped him
open his heart. It’s not that Pearl would
have minded; it was something else.
“I’m going to call you Angela from
now on.”
She felt they were taking things to
the next level.T
he fact was, she had been in a rush
her entire life, and she never knew
why. She just always wanted to get ev-
erything over with as soon as possible,
even things she was enjoying. She was
always racing for the end of the story.
She always wanted to get started on the
next thing. It wasn’t any pleasure for her
to be in the middle of something, even
though when other people were in the
middle of something she always envied
them. But she envied them in part be-
cause she couldn’t be in the middle: she
always had to be at the end, or telling
herself that she was nearing the end, in
order to bear anything—eating, work,
and any kind of relationship.
But it was different with Tom. She
actually wasn’t racing to the end of their
nights together, their lovemaking, their
conversations. She was happy to be in
the middle and wasn’t looking forward
to things ending; she wasn’t looking
around the corner to see what was com-
ing next. This perhaps had to do with
Thomas’s satisfaction with himself, his
life, and, by extension, her. She began to
think that maybe she was always rac-
ing for the end because she didn’t really
like herself: that racing toward the end
was a way of not staying with herself
long enough in any situation to see who
she really was. It was as if she needed
to rush past herself and her personality,
as if she both was on a train looking at
the landscape and was the landscape:
she wanted to be rushing past the land-
scape of her own self, maybe because
she couldn’t bear to look at it, for fear ofASLONGASSHE LIKESOn the way to the cemetery, I slept.
Not in the limousine that carried my mother’s coffin
but out cold in a van, the family all talking around me.
I was exhausted from her suffering, her pleas—
help me and enough, enough—
and trying to get the morphine to stay in the ditch of her gums.
How could I not have studied this in advance?
The way my mother learned to give shots in nursing school,
plunging the needle into an orange
then practicing on the other girls.
God only gives you strength for one day at a time.
How many times did I hear her say this?
Ask yourself, can I make this day?
And then she made her last day.
On the way back, the driver got lost. As we circled unfamiliar
fields and trees dizzy with blossoms, we began to imagine
we could buy some land.
Horses. A lake. Everything seemed possible.
And hilarious. We were a little hysterical,
driving into the luxury of the future.
I’ve never returned to my mother’s grave.
But I see her every day. Here she is in short boots,
coming back from the beach with a jar of seawater.
Each morning she feeds me a spoonful. Minerals.
It’s something she read in the Pleasantville Press.
Here she’s wrapping pints and quarts in that same paper,
sliding them into brown bags.
She’s counting out coins into the customers’ hands,
careful to touch their palms.
And here in her bathrobe on a Saturday night. The store just closed.
She bites into a hoagie, steak and onions, sips a beer.
Tomorrow morning she can sleep late. There’s a law
in New Jersey that liquor stores have to close on Sunday.
A blessed law that lets my mother sleep...
and then sit down with a cigarette and black coffee,
one strong leg crossed over the other.
She can sit there as long as she likes.—Ellen Bass