The Joyce Maynard Collection Read Online Free PDF Page B

with the plants growing on it that the person who bought it forgot to keep watered. You are like a hamster nobody remembered to feed.
    That was my mother. I could try to make up for some of the neglect, which I did, when I left her notes on her bed that said things like “For the World’s Number One Mom” with some rock I found or a flower, and jokes from my joke-a-day book, times when I made up funny songs for her, or cleaned out the silverware drawer and laid shelf liner paper on all the shelves, and when her birthday came around, or Christmas, and I gave her coupon books with the pages stapled together and on each one a promise like “Redeemable for carrying out trash,” or “Good for one vacuuming job.” When I was younger, I had made a coupon once that said “Husband for a day,” with the promise that whenever she cashed that one in, it would be just like having a husband around the house again, whatever she wanted, I’d take care of it.
    At the time I was too young to understand the part of being Husband for a Day I was not equipped to carry out, but in another way I think I sensed my own terrible inadequacy and it was the knowledge of this that weighed on me, when I lay in my narrow bed in my small room, next to hers, the walls between us so thin it was almost as if she were there with me. I could feel her loneliness and longing, before I had a name for it. It had probably never been about my father really. Looking at him now, it was hard to imagine he could ever have been worthy of her. What she had loved was loving.
    A year or two after the divorce, on one of our Saturday nights, my father had asked me if I thought my mother was going crazy. I was probably seven or eight at the time, not that my being older would have made it any easier to address this question. I was old enough to know that most people’s mothers didn’t sit in the car while their son ran into the grocery store with the money, to do the shopping for them, or go up to the teller at the bank—no ATM machines yet—with a check for five hundred dollars. Enough cash, she said, so we wouldn’t have to make another trip for a long time.
    I had been to other people’s houses, so I knew how other mothers were—the way they went to jobs and drove their children around and sat on the benches at the ball games and went to the beauty parlor and the mall and attended back-to-school night. They had friends, not just one sad woman with a retarded son in an oversize stroller.
    She’s just shy, I told my father. She’s busy with her music lessons. This was the year my mother had taken up the cello. She had watched a documentary about a famous cello player, possibly the greatest in the world, who got a disease so she started missing notes and dropping the bow and pretty soon she couldn’t play anymore, and her husband, who was also a famous musician, had left her for another woman.
    My mother had told me this story while we finished our Cap’n Andy frozen fish dinners one night. The husband had started sleeping with the famous cello player’s sister, my mother told me. After a while, the cello player couldn’t walk anymore. She had to lie there in bed, in the same house where the husband was in bed with the sister.
    Making love in the next room. What do you think of that, Henry? my mother had said.
    Bad, I said. Not that she was really waiting for my answer.
    My mother was learning to play the cello as a tribute to Jacqueline du Pré, she told me. She didn’t have a teacher, but she rented a cello from a music store a couple of towns over. A little on the small side, because it was meant for a child, but good enough to start on. Once she got the hang of it, she could move up to something better.
    My mom is fine, I told my father. She just gets sad sometimes, when people die. Like Jacqueline du Pré.
    You could come live with Marjorie and me, he said. And Richard and