The Pillar

There is something wrong with Mother; we've known since she moved in. She claims that the damp is making her ill, but her skin is as dry as chalk and the blue-white of nonfat milk. It is sloughing off her bones. Her hands are growing thick through the knuckles—calcified, almost—and her eyes water continuously, seeming to erode new channels through the thick wrinkles of her face, like the weeping statues of saints.

We have installed her in the downstairs bedroom, with a view of the lane and the old stone wall, above which the heads and shoulders of bicyclists glide by in both directions. It has been difficult, though, to remove her from the chair in the living room. We have pushed it up against the plate glass window at the back of the house, and she watches the deer moving through the yard and the birds that come to the little porch for feed. In her slack face, her eyes track their movements; her mouth works sometimes, as though she is speaking soundlessly to herself or chewing the fat, wet muscle of her tongue.

Sometimes, when we've been out walking the fences or crossing the stile into the commons, we'll come up the backyard and see her there in the window: a slouched figure huddled inside the pale pillar of her house-dress. When I asked her once whether she had seen us, waving at her from the lawn, she said, "No, no, only the—" and she made the spidered motion with her hands that she used to indicate the deer, a word she had apparently forgotten.

________

Mother had been living in the farmhouse, though the land was sold off piece by piece around her. What remained: the stagnant pond, the barn, the grain silo rising out of the dirt yard like the shabby beginnings of a future city. The fields were mostly for grazing, where once my grandmother had cut rows for her garden, pushing her hand plow as far as the row of trees. The dairy farm owned all that now, and the trees too, with their long, industrial banks of stainless steel; their thick, ripe smell of milk.

It was the vintner who called us, though—long-distance, expensive, an emergency number taped to the fridge—saying, "I think someone needs to take care of your mother," who found her shoeless and eating the grapes in his fields, the soles of her feet blackened from walking.

When we arrived at the house—low and familiar, but smaller somehow than it had been before, settled down on its foundation like a dog on its haunches—it became clear how she had been living. White dust covered everything. Newspapers were piled high enough to block the windows; sheet and blankets were nested on the floor; old photographs were propped on every surface, on tables and chairs and the saggy-bellied couch, their occupants peering out at all heights, as though participating in an incomprehensible parlor game. Mother had apparently been sleeping in the dining room, in balled quilts filled with sand.

She spoke quietly to herself, following us from room to room as we walked around the house, straightening piles of trash we left skewed, shutting doors we opened. When we pulled the curtains in the kitchen, scattering the cockroaches, she closed them again.

"You need light in here to get the bugs out," I said.

"Not now, mama," she said. "Not until morning."

"It's afternoon."

But she would not let us open the curtains until the imagined bombing was over, speaking all the while as though one or the other of us was her mother.

________

We put her in the spare room; we showed her the house. She was astonished by the dishwasher and by the front-loading washing machine, which she wanted to watch through all its cycles. She had never owned a tv—had never spent time in the home of anyone who did. Left alone, she sat too close to the screen, the picture reflecting off her wide, wet eyes. Unable to work the remote, or unwilling...