Part IV: Spin (Chapter 69)
“Who’s that?” he asks.
“Mother when she was young.”
He takes the photograph from me and squints. “Doesn’t look
anything like you,” he says.
I don’t know whether to take that as an insult or a
compliment. Maybe he means both.
He shakes his head. “Not my type. This woman definitely had an
unresolved Electra complex....”
“Oh, Sheldon, stop already.”
Shel raises his hands in front of his face. “Just
kidding...I’m a Gestalt shrink, remember?”
Aunt Sal joins in. “What are you kids talking about?”
She has always thought of me as a kid, but Shel is only four
years younger than her and Uncle Phil.
“Shel was just admiring Mom’s photograph.” I pass it to Sal
who looks at it for a long time.
“Rose was beautiful, wasn’t she?” Sal says to no one in
particular, shaking her head.
“What are you three talking about?” Nana shouts from the other
side of the pavilion.
“Nothing!” Sal says as she drops the picture into her pocket.
I can see Nana grabbing Dan’s arm as he pulls the video from
the VCR.
“You take me over there,” she says, pointing to Sal.
Danny wheels Nana over toward us. “Lemme see that.” She
snatches the photograph out of Sal’s pocket.
Sal throws up her hands and heads for the BBQ pit.
Nana studies the snapshot for a long time, her face softening
a bit at the sight of her lost daughter, the one she could never reach ‒
even
with the myriad novenas to St. Jude and rosaries to the Blessed Virgin offered
up on behalf of her immortal soul ‒ in an
evening gown, posing like Marilyn Monroe.
“Harummph,” she says, shoving the photograph into my hand. “I
put her out of my mind long ago.”
“She’s with God, I’m sure,” Dan offers.
“She was responsible for her own troubles,” I hear myself
saying. “What else could you do?”
Nana shakes a finger at me. “You hold your tongue, missy.
She’s still your mother.” She scowls and folds her arms across her chest.
“Besides, you should mend your own
ways before shootin’ off your mouth.”
“Oh, Nana...”
“Mark my words. You’ll burn in Hell for sure.” She takes
Shel’s hand and clutches it. “You be good to him because you aren’t likely to
find another steady man at your age and weight.”
No use arguing with her.
“Samantha is the sexiest woman I know, no matter what she
weighs,” Shel says in his sort of left-handed way.
I often wonder if he comes across this way to his patients:
giving and loving one minute and snatching it all away the next. All I know is
that if I were to seek out another therapist, I would avoid all Gestalt shrinks
and their confrontational psychodrama mumbo-jumbo.
“If I was 50 years younger, I’d give you a run for your money,” Nana says, winking at Shel.
He squeezes her hand. “I don’t run very fast.”
Nana grabs my forearm and clutches it. “With this one, you’d
better learn.”
I think about Ian waiting back home, how good it will feel to
crawl between the sheets with him, to get away from this madness.
Nana looks right into my eyes, as if she can read my mind and
suck out the entire affair with Ian just through sheer will. And it suddenly
occurs to me that Nana might empathize with me on a primitive level. That at
some point in her life, she might have had a secret lover who took her on wild
sexual expeditions, to places where no self-respecting woman of that era would
dare to go with her mate.
After all, what do I really
know about Nana’s early life?
At this moment, I feel certain that I’m more exposed than
Mother ever was when she stood naked before those strange men, the mermaid
dress crumpled at her feet.
You do
understand more than anyone, don’t you, Nana?
She nods, signaling Danny to wheel her away.
Nana looks so feeble and small in her wheelchair, no longer
the powerhouse of my childhood.
It hits me: the older we become, the more we depend upon mechanical devices for survival.
