style="font-size:15px;"> “Sharon, no home would take her. She’s not physically incapacitated,” Sigourney pointed out. “She isn’t sick or crippled …”
“… Except emotionally,” Bruce agreed. “Anyway, there’s not a pen that could hold her. She’d start food riots. The Big House. Mom’s Wallace Beery in drag. She’d tunnel her way out with her dentures.”
There was a pause. “We could tell them she’s mentally unstable,” Sharon suggested.
“Hey. It just might work,” Bruce said, opening his eyes to narrow slits. “We take her to some high-security retirement home and say she has senile dementia.”
“She’s always been demented, Bruce. It has nothing to do with her age,” Sigourney reminded him. “Anyway, she knows what day of the week it is. And who the president is.” Sigourney laughed bitterly. “When they ask her that one, they’ll get a fifteen-minute tirade!”
“Mommy, can I have some juice?” Jessie asked again.
“Barney, would you give Jessie a drink?” Sharon nearly shrieked. Both Sig and Bruce recoiled and winced. Barney had planted his own bulk in the kitchen and was simultaneously scarfing down every bit of the leftovers and watching the Rams game. Bruce clutched at his head. Sharon didn’t notice, nor did she move off the sofa. She certainly didn’t lower the volume. “Jessie, be patient or you’ll have to go sit in the thinking chair in the corner,” she warned in a little-girl voice. Jessie hung her head, then went to hide behind Sig’s eighty-dollar-a-yard Scalamandre silk curtains, taking the throw with her. “What if we say she’s delusional?” Sharon continued desperately. “We could say she’s not our mother—she only thinks she is.”
For the first time Bruce sat up straight and fully opened his eyes. “Why Sharon, I’m proud of you. That’s a truly devious idea. I like that in a person.” He paused. “Gaslight. Mom as a small, Jewish Ingrid Bergman. We all play Charles Boyer. ‘But Auntie Phyllis, you know you have no children!’ Then we start hiding her hat in the closet.”
“I hope you’re having a good time with this nonsense,” Sig said. “But Mom doesn’t have a hat, you’re out of the closet, and this nightmare begins in three days. Don’t encourage Sharon, Bruce.” Sig turned to her younger sister. “Sharri, no home would take Mom, and even if they did, she can’t afford it. I can’t afford it. Do you know what the DeWitt charges? Twenty thousand a month.”
“Well, she doesn’t have to be on East Seventy-ninth Street,” Barney said, finally entering with the juice. His bare belly hung out under his Rams T-shirt. Despite his own girth he still criticized Sharon’s weight. “She doesn’t need anything that fancy. She’s no friggin’ duchess.”
“Shut up, Barney,” Sig and Bruce told him simultaneously.
“Just put her in a mental institution,” Barney said as he was about to hand the brimming glass to Jessie. “A place for the criminally insane. That’s where she belongs anyway. She’s crazy.”
“She’s not crazy, Barney,” Sig began in a voice calibrated to be understood even by four-year-olds. “She’s not crazy: she’s hostile. To you. There is a difference.”
“Well, I say she’s crazy.”
Bruce raised his brows at his brother-in-law and looked over at Sharon. “Maybe it’s time for Barney to go sit in the thinking chair in the corner?” he said in a little-girl voice. Without a word, Barney turned and walked toward the kitchen. “Ah, that’s better,” Bruce said, closing his eyes. “Now I can die in peace.”
“Bruce, stop it. Have you got any ideas?” Sig asked, watching Jessie and the juice nervously. Was her niece wearing a hole in the cashmere? And why did she worry herself about material things when her whole life was coming apart?
“Well, I’ve been thinking. Mom is a kind of negative Auntie Mame.” He paused. “Eureka! That’s it: she’s the Anti-Mame. Not to be confused with the Antichrist, although in the South I understand she has been.” He paused. “What to do, what to do? Maybe we could spray her gold and sell her as a standing lamp at the Twenty-sixth Street flea market. She’s very fifties.”
“Would you get serious?” Sig snapped. Bruce wasn’t stupid. It was just that he was always joking, right until he went bankrupt. She thought of a way to focus him. “Mrs. Katz called me, too. Apparently Mom told her she was planning to be at the Chelsea.”
“Oh my God!” Bruce cried and nearly dropped his cigarette. “That’s only three blocks from my apartment!”
“Isn’t that where Sid Vicious and all those rock stars died of overdoses?” Sharon asked.
Bruce nodded, starting to feel well and truly panicked. “We should be so lucky. What would she die of? An overdose of Provera? The only way that stuff could kill you is if a carton of it fell on your head.”
Sigourney ignored the two of them. She would have to handle her mother and the holidays and the end of her relationship with Phillip all at once. “Would both of you stop with the jokes and hysteria and try, for just a minute, to get a grip?”
Bruce looked up at his older sister through bloodshot eyes. “Only if you’ll stop being so superior!” He clutched at bis aching head. “You know, the minute Mom gets here she’s going to start calling you ‘Susan’ again and you’re going to lose it. She’ll call you ‘Susan’ in front of all your brunch-eating, bond-dealing friends. And she’ll follow you to the bathroom after you eat to make sure you don’t vomit. You’ll balloon back up to a hundred and seventy pounds in no time.”
“Pthew. Phtew.” Jessie said as she sprayed juice all over the carpet and drapes. “Pthew! This has stuff in it!”
“Yes, sweetie. It’s called ‘pulp.’ It’s part of the orange,” Sharon explained serenely.
“It’s fresh-squeezed,” Sig said through clenched teeth, attempting to avoid a cerebral hemorrhage. “Barney, would you bring some paper towels and club soda in here?” she called, managing not to scream. “I’ll wipe off your face and take away the juice,” she said to her niece.
Jessie began to wail. Then, to Sig’s astonishment, so did Jessie’s mother. Sig and her brother looked at Sharon and then at one another in astonishment. Sig raised her brows in the international gesture for ‘what gives?’ Bruce shrugged in die answering symbol, ‘who knows?’ Even Jessie stopped crying and looked at her mother. Sig forgot about the stains and gingerly perched beside Sharon on the sofa. “What is it, Sharri?”
“I know you want Mom to come live with us. That’s what this is about. I know it. But she can’t. She just can’t!” Sharon sobbed. “We don’t have a place to put her. We don’t have a car for her to drive. Barney is using the spare room as his office until he gets a new job and, anyway, it would just be too much for me.”
Sharon continued sobbing, and picked up the corner of the cashmere throw to wipe her eyes. “I know you’re going to try and make me, but I won’t. I just can’t. I can’t let her live with Jessie and Travis,” she whimpered. She fumbled in her voluminous purse for her inhaler. When she was upset she reached for her asthma medicine. “Last time she did we had to have six double sessions with the family therapist. Do you know what that costs?” Sharon wiped her nose on the throw, and Sig winced. “Travis was having nightmares every night. He thinks ‘Nana’
