This Single Length of Rope

Named a Finalist for the 2022 Summer Short Fiction Prize

MEET THE ROPE. Study with me its twisted construction, follow its long length all the way from London to upstate New York, to my parents’ house. The rope lives here in the basement, coiled up, looking like nothing more than an old-fashioned beehive, hub of sweetness and industry. Designed for something useful, it now lies disillusioned. The hands that wielded it had other things in mind.

When I was eight my mother hung herself from one of the basement rafters. My father made it in time. She lived. But one saving has never been enough for her. It has to be kept up every day. That’s where a child comes in handy.

What kind of note can you leave that child, one you intend to leave motherless? Or perhaps there was a note and my father burned it jealously. Perhaps it was her husband, after all, she left noteless. Anyway, that first time, I never got a note. I didn’t know about such protocols yet.

My father moved us to London for a fresh start, yet there too, my mother’s death wish filled our flat. She went about her daily business, leaving me with visions of her floating in Victorian bathtubs behind opaque shower curtains I ripped aside, assured of her floating corpse. I saw my mother in the bathtub! I saw her because she wanted to be there. Daily, my unease bloomed into a dread that wouldn’t be diffused by the careful stalking of the tub, the ripping aside of the curtain, the shock of bone-white emptiness. Even when I grew up, and my parents left London and returned here to New York, the fantasy still plagued me. It plagues me to this day. But this is a small price to pay, is it not, for keeping your mother alive? Perhaps, were she to succeed… But I haven’t even told you, have I, what’s brought me back across the ocean to this grand old house?

My mother lies in a bed I haven’t seen for nearly five years. It would perhaps have been another five had she not two days ago attempted to end her life for the second time. I say ‘for the second time’ trusting that you’ll now understand: her life has been made up of a million tiny ineffectual attempts. A million that I alone know about, and have chosen to bear. A million attempts as workaday and predictable as dirty dishes or the need to defecate.

We go, my father and I, straight to her bedside. Lying beneath a quilt, she looks up when I approach, gives a little nod, then closes her eyes as though permitting me to absorb the sight for which I should be prepared. Her face is thin, wan. Her grey hair sticks out in tufts, like feathers. She wears the neck scarf. And though her wounds, this time around, are confined to her insides, there’s still something in her appearance that suggests violence.

“She’s whoozy,” my father says, fussing with the quilt. “I keep taking her arms out, but she keeps putting them back in.”

My father hovers over me as I sit beside my mother. I can hear the squeak of his new buckskin shoes as he shifts restlessly from foot to foot. My father always has new buckskin shoes.

“Mom?”

“You don’t have to whisper,” he says.

“I hear her.” Opening her eyes, my mother looks up at me.

“Hello you,” I say.

There’s a small movement underneath the quilt.

My father says, “Would you take her goddam arms out of there?”

It’s warm out. I don’t know why she’s buried like this. Peeling back the quilt, I reach inside, feel for my mother’s hand.

“What’s this?” she says, suddenly, strangely, alert.

“It’s a wedding ring, Mom. I got married. To Harry.”

“Harry?” she says.

“You know Harry…”

“Oh yes. I do. He has a beard. Looks like Jesus.”

“What kind of a boy is this for a Jewish girl, huh, Ma?”

“You’re trying to make humor,” she says. “That’s good…”

My father says, “Jesus, Rose, you don’t go and say that out loud.”

“Let her say it,” I tell him.

“Why, so she can kill the humor? Because that’s what it’ll do.” He looks at my mother. “If you tell her she’s trying to make humor, she won’t be able to make it anymore.”

“Yes, I will,” I say. “Leave her alone.”

“So Harry…” my mother says, squeezing my hand.

“Yes… Harry.”

My father points to a small brass bell by my mother’s bedside. He tells her to ring it if she needs something. When he leaves the room, my mother and I get re-acquainted quietly, without fanfare. Certainly it would seem anti-climactic after all these years, but I’m grateful for the prosaicness of it.

She says, “Where do you live, the two of you?”

“Quite near the old flat.”

“I wonder how the garden is. You remember. You and Harry planted it. We had mecanopsis. You’d water it with—what was that smelly stuff?”

“Fish emulsion. Mom, if you don’t want to talk about it…”

“Oh, I don’t know. It wasn’t anything. Anyone. It wasn’t your father… Perhaps it was this house,” she says, staring at the wall. “It started with the house, how it breathed around me. It was like being inside a whale. Whole. Alive. And everything else was just water. Swimmy… And oh, yes, the doors, they don’t have any locks… It is the house.” She looks at me. “Let’s talk about something else.”

“Why? Come on, Mom.”

“Let’s play the memory game. I remember our phone numbers. The phone numbers of every single house we’ve lived in.”

“Is this what you really want to do?”

“Yes. And the onion johnny on the bike. I remember him. And the rag and bone man.”

“What about the flower man?” I say, trying to muster up some interest for this old game we used to play. “The man with the cauliflower nose.”

“Oh yes, by the bank,” she says.

I can tell by the way she looks at me now that this isn’t enough. That she wants more. Wants me to do the work.

I say, “What about the old pervert who undressed every night in front of the window opposite? Remember those awful string vests?”

My mother laughs.

“Every night it was me and him,” I say, “staring at each other across Pont Street.”

“You smoked a cigar out that window once,” she says.

“So I did. I was nine or something. It was awful… Did I ever tell you where I got it? A man named Derek—or was it Brett?—at the cab rank. One day I was in the park and it was spring. I wanted to buy you flowers, but the flower man wasn’t there that Sunday. So I went up on the bank and picked all these crocuses. A big bunch of them. For you. Actually I cleaned out the hillside. I remember I wore my turquoise coat, white tights. It was quiet. Easter Sunday perhaps. Well suddenly this cab hurtled up Sloane Street and stopped dead in front of me. ‘Oye!’ the driver yelled. ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’ He went on and on. I stood there. Looked down. My knees were green. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Sir,’ and looked up. He liked that, you could tell. Probably no one ever called him Sir. ‘I’m sorry, Sir,’ I said. ‘They’re for my mother.’ I paused, and then I said, ‘She’s died, you see.’

“Well Derek—or was it Brett?—took me to the cab rank and gave me tea. He laid biscuits out on a plate. He gave me the cigar. ‘For your Dad,’ he said. ‘To console himself with.’ As I left I heard him say ‘Poor kiddie’ under his breath.”

“And you kept it,” my mother says.

“It nearly killed me, smoking that thing…”

After a few moments she says, “Did you need it then? Consoling?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I must have done.”

“Say yes if it’s yes.”

I look at her.

“Why are we talking about me?”

Turning her face away, she says in a dry voice, “I don’t want to talk about me.”

She starts to cry, so I say, “We can talk about anything you want.”

“Tell me about Harry,” she says, turning back. “Do the two of you plan children?” She takes the tissue I hand her, then reaching out, smoothes a stray lock of my hair into place.

“I don’t know. We haven’t decided.”

My mother nods, wipes her eyes. She looks suddenly more tired.

“I should leave you,” I say, getting up off the bed.

“Eliza? I’m glad I didn’t… I mean that I’m still…”

I’m already halfway to the door.

“What about you?” she says. “Are you all right? You look tired. Such a long flight for you.”

Outside it’s starting to get dark. A nuthatch alights on the old dead maple. I watch it creep its way face-down along the pock-marked trunk.

“Actually you look exhausted,” my mother says. “But you came. My baby came.”

“Of course I came. What exactly did you expect?”

“You’re angry,” she says, crossing her arms. “I knew you were.”

“Who’s angry?” my father says, coming back into the room. “Nobody’s angry, except when you mess up these cockamamie covers.”

My father smokes like a fiend. He even smokes now while arranging my mother beneath the bedclothes, propping her up on pillows. Dangling, the cigarette sticks to his lips, growing its shadow half inch of ash. He’s in bad need of an ashtray, but ignoring this, he continues working pillows, bedclothes, my mother, until the ash falls on to my mother’s chest. Without a word, she lifts her head, blows it away.

“You had such a strange little childhood,” she says once my father leaves.

“Yes, I suppose I did.” I look back at her. I’m not going to say a word about him now. “Shouldn’t you rest, Mom?”

“If only I had your memory,” she says, and looks right at me.

I don’t know why, but I suddenly feel like I’ve taken something away from her.

“So you’ll be OK?” I say. “Until I see you in the morning?”

“I wish you’d stop being kind. Don’t you want to yell at me?”

I tell her no, and it’s the truth. “You’re too weak. I want you to get strong first. Then maybe.”

“Oh… Something to look forward to,” she says, and laughs a little.

“Now get some rest. You’re going to need your strength.”

“Elzie?” she says as I’m about to leave. “I—”

I put my hand up to stop her.

Sliding down, she pulls up the quilt.

The mound she makes beneath it is small, almost shockingly so, and for a moment I stand here looking at it. It… I mean my mother. I stand here looking at my mother.

*    *    *    *

Once my father’s gone to bed, I walk into my mother’s study and sit at her desk. It’s a fan-carved Chippendale desk with lots of tiny drawers, secret compartments, and pigeon holes. I used to like sitting here as a child, opening everything up, inspecting all the things my mother kept inside. I suppose, to use her word, it consoled me, gave me a kind of comfort. And as I sit here now, I find myself instinctively drawn to all the old places, removing stationary, index cards, rubber bands, exploring stacks of paper arranged neatly in the pigeon holes. It’s when I’m leafing idly through these that I come across an envelope with my name on it, written in my mother’s unmistakable hand. Before I can think about it, I’m unsealing it, removing the single piece of paper inside. There’s no question in my mind as to what this is, and perhaps for this very reason I don’t unfold it right away. When I do, I see the familiar, well-nigh illegible scrawl, like a colony of spiders skidding across the page. My mother has genuinely appalling handwriting, and as I begin to read her words, the last she intended to leave me with, I’m grateful for how slowly, painstakingly I’m forced to proceed.

I read it through once, then go back to the beginning, picking out the odd word here or there, noticing the idiosyncrasies of certain letters, most notably the g’s. Suddenly I strike myself as ridiculous. Folding the letter up, I put it back in its envelope. Briefly, I toy with the idea of returning it to the stack of papers from which it came. But the seal has been broken. It’s too late for subterfuge.

Instead I slip a fresh piece of stationary out of the stack, and take up my mother’s pen. I try putting my finger on what I feel, but can only deduce that I must be nervous, because I feel the impulse to doodle. Yet when I put pen to paper it isn’t my customary squiggles that loop from its nib. Several words get printed, boldly, without embellishment. I look down at them with curiosity, with a certain surprise at their appearance. Several more, and I’m done. I lay down the pen. I crease the paper into halves. It’s this that I slide back into the stack.

When I switch off the desk lamp my eyes adjust quickly to the absence of light. I soon become aware though that all is not in darkness. A tissue of light comes from the night lamp on my mother’s bedside table. On my way downstairs, passing my parents’ room, I’m struck by the fact that their door is open. That they still leave it open, though given that it’s now only the two of them, there’s perhaps no good reason to close it. Except that I’m here, and after everything that’s happened, you’d think they’d want their privacy. The fact that they don’t should mean something. There’s something I’m supposed to see, perhaps to overhear. Standing outside, I wait to hear my mother’s muffled sobs, my father’s gruff brand of comfort. I wait to see the orange tip of a cigarette travel the room, a burning target at which my mother will never take aim. I wait for all this, but like so much else that fails to be evident on the lit-up surface of things, my waiting’s in vain. My father, a large man, is lying on his stomach. One arm extends toward my mother, his wife. Sitting up, she’s still propped on her pillows, though her head has fallen to one side. Her left hand lies limp an inch or so from my father’s. I wonder if they’d held hands. And which had been the first to let go.

*    *    *    *

I’m too restless to settle down, so I wander around downstairs in the dark for a while. I don’t need light to guide me, because I know this house so well. I know where every piece of furniture sits, which piece of floor is covered by which Persian or Chinese carpet. Finding myself in the living room, I step to within inches of the Steinway grand and trace the curve of its body with my hands. Its highly polished ebony finish is like a mirror, but in the darkness, I can only imagine my reflection. I suddenly remember the letter I’ve been holding on to. Not that I’d forgotten about it—no, not exactly that; but it strikes me as odd that I could’ve let myself think about or notice anything else. What I feel, like air, is hard to describe: not pain itself, rather an atmosphere, a condition conducive to its arrival.

*    *    *    *

I stalk the rope beehive now, much as I stalk the bathtub in my other life. Here it lies in this dark basement, coiled up. So this is what we share, my mother and I? This single length of rope?

She’s got to pay for what happened to me down here. That much, she says in her note. Doesn’t say what it was, assuming that I remember. The rope must know too, for evidently it was involved. What happened to me happened before what happened to her. I should forgive my father, she says; he was only trying to teach me a lesson. She went along with it.

The note sparks nothing in me, no recognition. She’s broken the rules of the memory game. This is one game you can’t play with yourself. It takes two. In the game you try to outdo your opponent with your memory prowess. But you must keep in play all the agreed-on facts of life. I may remember nothing of what she says, but I do remember this: the word guilt appears three times in her note. Yet given the appalling nature of her penmanship, it looks more like quilt.

I can’t live with the quilt. This quilt will bury me.

When I kick it, the rope beehive collapses. I leave it on its side, clinging to its old shape.

~

The next morning, I wake to the sounds of pottering in the kitchen. When I go in, I can see my father’s in a cheerful mood. Actually, he seems elated.

“She’s feeling better,” he says to me. “She’s really feeling better.”

And I’m glad. I’m truly glad. I mean I love my mother.

Her favorite herbal tea. Toast. Cream cheese. I’ll make her a beautiful tray. We ought to celebrate her survival.

My father watches coffee drip into the pot. He’s whistling a tune from Westside Story. I try to connect him to the father of my mother’s note. I look at his Santa-like cheeks, shiny with morning, the chins that quiver when he moves or talks, all the sights for which I’ve always felt an unaccountable rising of bile in my throat. I look at him with new curiosity, interested to know what he’s capable of.

“She left me a note,” I say. “The note. Actually I found it. I think I’m supposed to believe that she didn’t mean for me to find it, but…”

I’m deciding which anemone I’ll choose for the glass bud vase on my mother’s tray. There are a whole bunch of them in a pitcher on the counter.

“Why do you always make trouble?” my father says. “Come on. Let up. Have some coffee.”

I gesture him for a cigarette instead. The instant his flame meets it, I’m back on my eight-year-old bed. It’s night. The night. My mother comes into my room with a new red necklace she makes no attempt to cover up. Or perhaps she wore the scarf. Memory plays it either way.

Taking a lusty puff at the cigarette, I cough my heart out and hand it back to my father. He looks bewildered standing there with a smoke in each hand. Like I’ve interfered with the habit of a lifetime. Messed with muscle memory. I feel a twinge of empathy for him, faced with a dilemma like this: kill yourself quicker? Console yourself twice as hard? There are no easy answers.

I watch him pour coffee into his mug. He still adds heavy cream, but the two sugars have grown into three.

“Anyway, you wouldn’t believe this note—the thing she talked about. Something about me and the basement. Is it true? That something happened to me down there?”

It’s not that he slams the mug down on the counter. He doesn’t. He puts it down. But I jump anyway.

He doesn’t answer me.

“Ironic, isn’t it? That I should be talking about it to you, of all people.”

I look down at the tray, trying to see what I’ve missed.

“Maybe you’re doing that rare thing,” my father says. “Letting bygones be bygones?”

Folding a napkin, I place it beneath the spoon.

“We’re getting back on our feet—trying to—if you’d just fall in. Lend a hand.”

“I don’t lend out what won’t be given back.”

He doesn’t get me, he says. All this shit I haul around. “Is it remotely possible we could lay this to rest? For your old lady’s sake?”

“This? What this?”

“Us. The past. The way we are.” He looks at me. “Did I ever get a shred of help with your mother? A single lousy shred? Do you have any idea what it’s like, dealing with her? But no, how could you? Your answer is to run. And the minute you’re back you’re blaming me.”

“Nobody said that. I—”

“Don’t waste your breath. It’s written all over your face. Your father—asshole. That’s how you’ve always thought of me. And OK, so I’ve earned it—some of it—but only—”

That’s when we hear it. The bell. Shrill, insistent, despite its small size.

Removing a handkerchief from his pocket, my father wipes his face.

“Your mother,” he says.

I nod.

“She must need something.”

I shrug.

He says, “Don’t you see, kiddo, your mother wants you. She needs you. Listen, we’ve all done some things we shouldn’t have. But what’s past is past. Bottom line,” he says, “she’s just glad to have you back.” He pauses. “So am I.”

I turn away, gather up the crusts I’ve cut from my mother’s toast. They’re sharp, blade-like, and crushing them to coarse powder in my fist, I open the bin, let what’s left fall through my fingers. Choosing my anemone, I place it in the vase. When I look back, I notice that the bitterness has faded from my father’s face. His ash is about to fall, there’s no ashtray on the counter, so I separate my mother’s cup from her saucer and slide it over to him.

He says, “You better get that up to her. You know your mother and cold toast.”

*    *    *    *

When I open her door, my mother looks up, smiles. I lay the tray on her lap.

She says, “Oh, it’s beautiful, sweetie. What pains you’ve taken.” Very gently she touches the petals of the anemone. “You know what? Today I’m glad I’m here. I remember how good it feels to be alive.” She reaches for my hand. “And I’m glad it’s you here beside me.”

There’s always this moment before our two hands meet, but today it seems unusually, impossibly long and full of room. Long enough for me to think about what my mother’s done, how close it came this time to costing her her life. Long enough for me to wonder who will really pay for it, this close call by which she’s managed to call me back. Long enough for me to think of the expense to myself, of keeping my mother alive. A job I never wanted. One I don’t today.

This is when it occurs to me: that I might say precisely nothing. Keep my lips tightly sealed. Like the envelope she has no reason to suspect is not still hidden in her desk. She will find her surprise much as I found mine: in the innocent pursuit of comfort, of consolation. One day soon when she’s strong enough to get out of bed. With this same hand, to take up the cudgel, as my father always says.

I brush by this hand and reach for the bell instead, half covered by her quilt.

“You’d better eat,” I tell my mother. “You’ll want to be up and about soon.”

She nods and sets to. Holding on to the bell, I sit here watching.

I’d forgotten how greedily my mother eats, consuming every last morsel of what I’ve brought her. The picture she makes reminds me of what I’ve left her. My note. My final rally in the old game she’s tried so desperately to revive:

‘POOR OLD BRETT,’ I wrote. ‘I REMEMBER NOW, IT WAS BRETT. I TOLD HIM YOU DIED. HE BELIEVED ME.’