8956825209375

still to go. She ate lunch at her desk, there being no restaurants within walking distance,
at least in the midday heat, and there were no sidewalks anyway. In July came the
monsoon rains, the skies darkening ominously every afternoon right as she got o work,
and the downpours, though brief, were apocalyptic. She must’ve felt like the physical
world was mocking her, because by the time she got home, drenched to her skin, the
skies would be blue again and steam rising from the asphalt, the air not just hot but
humid. “What an awful, awful place,” she lamented, exactly what she’d said that
morning in Phoenix after learning she wouldn’t be working for GE anymore.
Ironically, what ended up doing her in was neither Tucson, with its heat and
monsoons, nor the job she hated (her new company poorly run, nothing like GE), nor
the fact that she’d made no friends, but rather the return of her emotional equilibrium.
One of the ironies of my mother’s condition was that her periodic tranquillity was
usually a mixed blessing. Panic might cause her to spin out of control, but once she got
her bearings again, she could see beyond her own torment. Back in Gloversville, her
desperation to make one last grab at a fullling life hadn’t allowed her to imagine what
that would be like in Tucson. It had to be better because it couldn’t be any worse. In her
mind’s eye everything she saw was on a Gloversville scale, only better. She pictured me
living nearby, down the street, maybe, or right around the corner. But Tucson was like
Phoenix, a sprawling city of identically ugly intersections, where you were always half
an hour away from anywhere else. It was a sea of cars, and she didn’t have or want one.
Being “close” in Tucson wasn’t ten minutes by foot; it was twenty minutes by car—and
much longer if you were living, say, in a remote trailer park.
Worse, her failure to accurately predict her own life in Tucson was compounded by
her inability to understand ours. She had no idea how hard we were working, me on my
Ph.D., Barbara on supporting us while I did. Even before my mother’s arrival, we’d been
stretched thin in virtually every respect. As short as we were on money, we had even
less time. I needed my Sundays for grading papers, and on Friday and Saturday nights,
for extra cash, I was a singer in a popular restaurant. Barbara’s large family all lived in
Tucson, which provided plenty of other obligations. But whenever something
unexpectedly came up in my mother’s life, I always did my best to accommodate her,
and she could tell it wasn’t easy. “You’re always there when I need you,” she’d said one
day, gratefully patting my hand in the dentist’s oce after she’d chipped a tooth. The
plan we’d developed back at the trailer was intended to restore her independence, and
its major components were now in place. She had an apartment and a job. What was
dawning on her, though, was that none of this was sustainable. The truth was that she
needed me, at least emotionally, all the time. The only thing that could work in the long
run would be a version of the old Helwig Street model in which each of us was central to
the other’s daily existence. But eventually, Barbara and I would have children, and as a
father I’d have even less time to devote to her. And when I nished the Ph.D., my
university career would begin, and who knew where that would take me? Back in
Gloversville it might have seemed that we were separated only by geography, by all
those miles, but now she understood that our separation was not only more profound
than she’d imagined but was in fact only going to get worse.