Rick thought if she told him the story again, he would kill her. It was an irrational decision, since she was near death, and if he merely practiced patience, the event would occur without his committing a crime. But the anecdote—which she had repeated heedlessly for the third time today? fourth?—was as inciting an offense to him as infidelity might be to a married man.
“It was at a restaurant in Paris forty years ago,” his mother said, as if sharing a delicious secret. “Jean Calot was suddenly seated at the table beside your father and myself. I’d always loved him in the movies—‘jolie laide,’ ugly beautiful, I called him,” as if she had made up the movie star’s generally accepted nick name and needed to—once again—translate the common foreign phrase. “He had a little dog with him, which appalled your father—it seemed so unclean and against the restaurant’s rules, unusual for France. But I took that dog—a Pekinese, I think it was—hid it on my lap for the entire meal, and fed it scraps. Jean Calot whispered thanks to me at the end. ‘Merci, Mademoiselle,’ he said. ‘Mademoiselle!' And I was over forty!”
And clearly married—and borderline humiliating her husband, Rick’s father, by flirting with the film star. But that wasn’t really what infuriated Rick about the story: it was his mother’s obvious delight in all its shallow details: the fancy restaurant, the trip to France, the pure-bred pedigreed dog: they reflected what she relished in the world, what she respected, even worse.
Rick knew that his mother’s considerable wealth would come to him once she died: he was her only relation and now her kind-of companion (though he only came over once a day to spell an exasperated paid housekeeper before another could arrive). In recent years, he had refused loans or gifts of money from her, but he was no longer so—completely—self-righteous, because he was no longer so successfully self-employed. He also knew that the old woman suffered from dementia, a kind in a mild early stage and losing the race to ruin her to the cancer more quickly killing her. He knew all this: he wasn’t proud of his emotions. (Nor was he proud of his life: he was an unmarried freelance business “consultant” in his forties, wasting time others would have used to achieve much and love others.)
Still, the fact that his mother clung to this particular story like a shipwreck survivor does a last piece of wood in the water—that this was what was keeping her afloat, that its (what was the word politicians always used?) values were still accessible in her brain long after most others had been washed away—repelled him. If this was what she prized—and if she lived more in movie fantasies than in life—what did it say about him? His fists primed to pummel her only relaxed when the last words of the tale rolled out of his mother’s mouth—and they were always the same; she was as practiced and perfect in her part as a Broadway star in a long-running play: “’Mademoiselle!’ And I was over forty!”
Rick exhaled and rose, hearing the knock that was obviously the night nurse‘s.
An option beside matricide, of course, had always been available to him, but it had seemed too creepy and even cruel. Now, with his mother lingering longer in life than he had anticipated, it was imperative that he stop the story and if the best he could do was simply change it to another, so be it.
He’d always heard rumors and heresay about the service, but now trolled the internet for actual information, which he found. He was tipped off to a storefront on 23rd and 3rd that had once played host to a hockshop, in the days when people still sold only things and not ideas. It had no official web site or phone number; it wasn’t actually illegal but unsavory enough to have to be discreet about itself; some court would rule on it eventually. Until then, it was hidden in the back of the small shoe repair store, one so inexpensive and old-fashioned that it—ironically enough—attracted beat cops as clientele. They either suspected nothing or used the clandestine business themselves, the way they did whorehouses, providing “protection.”
When he arrived, Rick had a peculiar sense of having been there before, but he dismissed it as déjà vu or a wistful regret he hadn’t shown up sooner. The paunchy and sixty-something shoe repair man put out a “Closed” sign and took him into the back when he said what his need was. The man closed the door of a cluttered storage space. Half hidden by boxes of shoes was a cabinet that looked not unlike an old “card catalogue” used before libraries went completely to computers. (Maybe he’d even bought one at auction, Rick thought.) A crude scrawl on an index card taped to the front said, simply, “Anecdotes.”
“Buying or selling?” the man asked, getting right down to work. He had the kind of accent one didn’t hear much any more.
Rick was caught off-guard by the lack of formalities but quickly recovered.
“I—buying."
“Category?”
“Well…’Edifying,’ I guess. Is that a category?”
“Sorry,” the man said, flatly and with a touch of impatience. “The closest I can get to that is probably ‘Inspirational.’”
“Religious, you mean? No, that wouldn’t be right.”
“Well, there’s two sub-cats: Inspirational slash Religious and Inspirational slash Secular.”
Rick felt he wasn’t being given time to think (or to reconsider?). Maybe it was better this way. “The second one.”
“Okay. Good.” Then the man said, as if to himself, “That’s Lot Number 25.”
Rick waited for him to approach the cabinet and offer up some choices, but that wasn’t the way it worked. First he was asked for whom he was buying—presumably people bought for themselves as well as others—and then with gruff tact what “the situation” was. Rick explained compassionately yet directly, and the man nodded once, immediately understanding (there were only so many reasons to replace the expression of experiences) and, after calculating silently, said, “Two days.”
“But—don’t I—get to hear—“
“We choose for you. That’s our service. That’s what you’re paying us for.”
The last line was Rick’s blunt cue to cough it up, cash only, and he did. There was no handshake—Rick awkwardly offered one before withdrawing—just a receipt stamped “Bought” and pulled from a pad not unlike a policeman’s ticket book. Maybe the man had gotten it from one of those friendly cops. (And who would want more than a cop to have other anecdotes than his own painful ones, Rick wondered?)
“Thanks,” he said, but it was unnecessary. Still stupidly trying to ingratiate himself, he bought some shoelaces on the way out.
Two days later, the little envelope arrived. It contained a packet filled with solution and a sort of syringe. A tiny booklet of directions—in English and in Chinese—was the only other item. Dutifully following the instructions—and looking at the surprisingly elegant, cross-hatched illustrations—he performed the procedure. (He had stayed after the night nurse arrived and, while she read a magazine in the living room, entered his mother’s dark bedroom. As the old woman slept, he gently rolled the nightgown sleeve up her scrawny arm, and the vein was easily found and pierced beneath her wafery skin.) The booklet said to give it twelve hours to work, not so much for the new story to take hold but for the old to be subsumed: it was like coloring your hair, Rick thought, remembering concealing the gray in his own, though took longer.
The next day, he heard with trepidation his mother twice begin the usual story—“It was at a restaurant in Paris”—and each time get no further than the first line (the second time, no further than “restaurant”). Finally, on the third try, he heard her say:
“I was on a crowded subway about twenty years ago. It was in February, around Valentine’s Day. A girl in her twenties came on and sat down next to me. She had a half-flat balloon decorated with hearts tied around her wrist. She had obviously come from an office party and was very drunk and not used to being so. As soon as the car took off, she got a distressed look on her face. Then she vomited all over the floor. People scrambled into each other running to avoid her and it. But I unfolded a page of the newspaper I was reading and carefully laid it down upon the sick. Then I put my arm around the ill—and clearly mortified—girl, and rode with her like that until her stop.”
Afterwards, his mother’s face had the same self-satisfied expression she always wore after the Paris tale (as her voice had been just as smug during the telling). It was as if she had been dubbed by someone else’s voice in a foreign film or had her lines changed and censored for a TV showing: her essential performance was still the same.
Yet it didn’t matter, not to Rick. As he heard her story—and heard it again and again, for his mother’s memory hadn’t been improved nor her repetitiveness decreased, only the specifics of what she said replaced—he was moved. He was more than moved: he found himself feeling something he hadn’t felt for his mother in years, not since the days when he was young, his father still alive, and her acquisitiveness and shallowness not so intractably in place, when she could still surprise him with a sudden show of warmth and kindness. He felt love.
It was a lucky and last-minute love. As he helped her into bed that night, he sensed her slip beneath the silk sheets with finality: hers was like a body poured from a ship under the waves. She disappeared inside their liquid flutter and, before she fell asleep, she died.
In the days ahead, as he cleaned out her apartment, Rick could not stop his tears. Inevitably now, when he thought of his mother, he thought of the one event—his mother and the sick girl on the subway—the one that was easiest to entertain, that had been worth every penny to place inside her.
He inherited her money. He paid his considerable credit card debt with it and bought an apartment, an actual investment as opposed to his current worthless rental. As a tribute to his mother, the first thing he ordered for the place was a box set of “The Classic Films of Jean Calot,” called “Ugly/Beautiful.”
His attachment to her grew; her selflessness soon made him feel unworthy of the legacy she had left him. It made him wait to unpack, as if he did not deserve to put his things in a home that she had made possible for him to own. The closed boxes, brought in by professional packers and movers, became symbols of his inadequacies—his laziness, selfishness, and hostility, some of which had been directed at his mother—all the flaws he had to hide.
At last, if only to get a glass to fill with obliterating wine, he opened up a box. He pulled out a long-stemmed flute and hastily tore away the newspaper in which it was wrapped. As he was casting aside the yellowing page—from his home, he assumed, and sports, he noticed—he saw its date.
It was, strangely, from around the time of his mother’s inspiring story, twenty years before. He saw that a corner of it was encrusted with a dot of dried-up liquid-solid mix.
Rick sat on the floor, though a chair and couch were available: he didn’t even think to have that wine. It had been he who had placed the paper on the subway floor and saved a page as keepsake, he who had helped the sickened stranger.
He scrambled open another box, and then another, until he found his folder of meticulously kept bills and receipts. In the middle was a familiar looking, shabby ticket from the shoe store, dated from two years before, and stamped “Sold.”
He had dealt the anecdote when he was strapped for funds—when he was poor and yet still principled enough to turn down his mother’s cash. The selling—a reverse procedure, an incision and withdrawal performed under vaguely unsanitary conditions in the store’s back room—was meant to take away his memory not only of the incident but its removal. This was why the shoe store had seemed familiar. It had been a faulty process, and left him with a shard of knowledge.
Had the shoe repair man remembered his face and returned the story to him? Was that what he had really been “paying us for?" And how many other such incidents of charity had he hocked?
Rick didn’t know. He only knew that it was his own good will he should have been celebrating. Whether he inherited her wealth or not, he was as far away from his mother as the living were from the dead. With new tears—the “cry for happy” kind he’d heard so much about—he began to unpack for real, to fill the empty space with the things of himself, those of a man who could show love to others and so was worthy of receiving it.
It took several weeks until the rooms were fully furnished. In that time, he took two steps to truly right his life: made inquiries about starting a foundation for the poor with his inheritance and asked out a bright, attractive woman who worked in the city agency he had approached.
“It’s been awhile since I’ve been on a date,” said this Sandra, who was a saucy type. “I’m rusty. I’ll have to remember all my charming anecdotes.”
“I’m looking forward,” Rick said, “to hearing them.”
He was to meet her for dinner that night. It was his first date in months, as well, too many months for him to count: he felt nervous and excited.
To calm himself, in the half hour before he left, he surfed TV. Then he saw something sitting beside the set: the unopened box of Jean Calot’s old films.
It seemed amusing and appropriate to pop one in. He chose the best-known of the actor’s many hits, a film considered classic that he was convinced he’d never seen: “La Derniere Histoire,” made forty years before.
The black-and-white print was pristine. Even though Rick had neglected to turn on the subtitles, the story started simply. In Paris, a young and handsome, mug-faced Calot was commuting home from his laborer’s job. When he boarded a train, the good-natured hero saw a pretty girl seated opposite him. She wore a balloon on her wrist and a pleasant but queasy expression. As she suddenly and unsteadily rose, her face grew grim and her eyes wide. Rick saw the newspaper folded beneath Calot’s arm. He rushed to hit the stop but hit the pause instead and, before it could occur, froze the incident forever.
Rick sank to his knees and covered his face, to escape the truth. The newspaper had belonged to the movers; its stain was food from some forgotten meal. He had never behaved—never cared enough about another person to behave—in such a way. He had been touched and inspired by an incident from someone else’s mind, sold a story from a story, lived in other people’s glossy dreams. And if he had marketed other such instances, they had been similarly purloined.
He was a creature from his mother’s lap, the little dog that she fed scraps. It was the story, the only story, of his life.
NOTE: Anecdote currently available. Ask for Lot #731. Categories: Family/Values; Funny/Sad; Ugly/Beautiful.
“It was at a restaurant in Paris forty years ago,” his mother said, as if sharing a delicious secret. “Jean Calot was suddenly seated at the table beside your father and myself. I’d always loved him in the movies—‘jolie laide,’ ugly beautiful, I called him,” as if she had made up the movie star’s generally accepted nick name and needed to—once again—translate the common foreign phrase. “He had a little dog with him, which appalled your father—it seemed so unclean and against the restaurant’s rules, unusual for France. But I took that dog—a Pekinese, I think it was—hid it on my lap for the entire meal, and fed it scraps. Jean Calot whispered thanks to me at the end. ‘Merci, Mademoiselle,’ he said. ‘Mademoiselle!' And I was over forty!”
And clearly married—and borderline humiliating her husband, Rick’s father, by flirting with the film star. But that wasn’t really what infuriated Rick about the story: it was his mother’s obvious delight in all its shallow details: the fancy restaurant, the trip to France, the pure-bred pedigreed dog: they reflected what she relished in the world, what she respected, even worse.
Rick knew that his mother’s considerable wealth would come to him once she died: he was her only relation and now her kind-of companion (though he only came over once a day to spell an exasperated paid housekeeper before another could arrive). In recent years, he had refused loans or gifts of money from her, but he was no longer so—completely—self-righteous, because he was no longer so successfully self-employed. He also knew that the old woman suffered from dementia, a kind in a mild early stage and losing the race to ruin her to the cancer more quickly killing her. He knew all this: he wasn’t proud of his emotions. (Nor was he proud of his life: he was an unmarried freelance business “consultant” in his forties, wasting time others would have used to achieve much and love others.)
Still, the fact that his mother clung to this particular story like a shipwreck survivor does a last piece of wood in the water—that this was what was keeping her afloat, that its (what was the word politicians always used?) values were still accessible in her brain long after most others had been washed away—repelled him. If this was what she prized—and if she lived more in movie fantasies than in life—what did it say about him? His fists primed to pummel her only relaxed when the last words of the tale rolled out of his mother’s mouth—and they were always the same; she was as practiced and perfect in her part as a Broadway star in a long-running play: “’Mademoiselle!’ And I was over forty!”
Rick exhaled and rose, hearing the knock that was obviously the night nurse‘s.
An option beside matricide, of course, had always been available to him, but it had seemed too creepy and even cruel. Now, with his mother lingering longer in life than he had anticipated, it was imperative that he stop the story and if the best he could do was simply change it to another, so be it.
He’d always heard rumors and heresay about the service, but now trolled the internet for actual information, which he found. He was tipped off to a storefront on 23rd and 3rd that had once played host to a hockshop, in the days when people still sold only things and not ideas. It had no official web site or phone number; it wasn’t actually illegal but unsavory enough to have to be discreet about itself; some court would rule on it eventually. Until then, it was hidden in the back of the small shoe repair store, one so inexpensive and old-fashioned that it—ironically enough—attracted beat cops as clientele. They either suspected nothing or used the clandestine business themselves, the way they did whorehouses, providing “protection.”
When he arrived, Rick had a peculiar sense of having been there before, but he dismissed it as déjà vu or a wistful regret he hadn’t shown up sooner. The paunchy and sixty-something shoe repair man put out a “Closed” sign and took him into the back when he said what his need was. The man closed the door of a cluttered storage space. Half hidden by boxes of shoes was a cabinet that looked not unlike an old “card catalogue” used before libraries went completely to computers. (Maybe he’d even bought one at auction, Rick thought.) A crude scrawl on an index card taped to the front said, simply, “Anecdotes.”
“Buying or selling?” the man asked, getting right down to work. He had the kind of accent one didn’t hear much any more.
Rick was caught off-guard by the lack of formalities but quickly recovered.
“I—buying."
“Category?”
“Well…’Edifying,’ I guess. Is that a category?”
“Sorry,” the man said, flatly and with a touch of impatience. “The closest I can get to that is probably ‘Inspirational.’”
“Religious, you mean? No, that wouldn’t be right.”
“Well, there’s two sub-cats: Inspirational slash Religious and Inspirational slash Secular.”
Rick felt he wasn’t being given time to think (or to reconsider?). Maybe it was better this way. “The second one.”
“Okay. Good.” Then the man said, as if to himself, “That’s Lot Number 25.”
Rick waited for him to approach the cabinet and offer up some choices, but that wasn’t the way it worked. First he was asked for whom he was buying—presumably people bought for themselves as well as others—and then with gruff tact what “the situation” was. Rick explained compassionately yet directly, and the man nodded once, immediately understanding (there were only so many reasons to replace the expression of experiences) and, after calculating silently, said, “Two days.”
“But—don’t I—get to hear—“
“We choose for you. That’s our service. That’s what you’re paying us for.”
The last line was Rick’s blunt cue to cough it up, cash only, and he did. There was no handshake—Rick awkwardly offered one before withdrawing—just a receipt stamped “Bought” and pulled from a pad not unlike a policeman’s ticket book. Maybe the man had gotten it from one of those friendly cops. (And who would want more than a cop to have other anecdotes than his own painful ones, Rick wondered?)
“Thanks,” he said, but it was unnecessary. Still stupidly trying to ingratiate himself, he bought some shoelaces on the way out.
Two days later, the little envelope arrived. It contained a packet filled with solution and a sort of syringe. A tiny booklet of directions—in English and in Chinese—was the only other item. Dutifully following the instructions—and looking at the surprisingly elegant, cross-hatched illustrations—he performed the procedure. (He had stayed after the night nurse arrived and, while she read a magazine in the living room, entered his mother’s dark bedroom. As the old woman slept, he gently rolled the nightgown sleeve up her scrawny arm, and the vein was easily found and pierced beneath her wafery skin.) The booklet said to give it twelve hours to work, not so much for the new story to take hold but for the old to be subsumed: it was like coloring your hair, Rick thought, remembering concealing the gray in his own, though took longer.
The next day, he heard with trepidation his mother twice begin the usual story—“It was at a restaurant in Paris”—and each time get no further than the first line (the second time, no further than “restaurant”). Finally, on the third try, he heard her say:
“I was on a crowded subway about twenty years ago. It was in February, around Valentine’s Day. A girl in her twenties came on and sat down next to me. She had a half-flat balloon decorated with hearts tied around her wrist. She had obviously come from an office party and was very drunk and not used to being so. As soon as the car took off, she got a distressed look on her face. Then she vomited all over the floor. People scrambled into each other running to avoid her and it. But I unfolded a page of the newspaper I was reading and carefully laid it down upon the sick. Then I put my arm around the ill—and clearly mortified—girl, and rode with her like that until her stop.”
Afterwards, his mother’s face had the same self-satisfied expression she always wore after the Paris tale (as her voice had been just as smug during the telling). It was as if she had been dubbed by someone else’s voice in a foreign film or had her lines changed and censored for a TV showing: her essential performance was still the same.
Yet it didn’t matter, not to Rick. As he heard her story—and heard it again and again, for his mother’s memory hadn’t been improved nor her repetitiveness decreased, only the specifics of what she said replaced—he was moved. He was more than moved: he found himself feeling something he hadn’t felt for his mother in years, not since the days when he was young, his father still alive, and her acquisitiveness and shallowness not so intractably in place, when she could still surprise him with a sudden show of warmth and kindness. He felt love.
It was a lucky and last-minute love. As he helped her into bed that night, he sensed her slip beneath the silk sheets with finality: hers was like a body poured from a ship under the waves. She disappeared inside their liquid flutter and, before she fell asleep, she died.
In the days ahead, as he cleaned out her apartment, Rick could not stop his tears. Inevitably now, when he thought of his mother, he thought of the one event—his mother and the sick girl on the subway—the one that was easiest to entertain, that had been worth every penny to place inside her.
He inherited her money. He paid his considerable credit card debt with it and bought an apartment, an actual investment as opposed to his current worthless rental. As a tribute to his mother, the first thing he ordered for the place was a box set of “The Classic Films of Jean Calot,” called “Ugly/Beautiful.”
His attachment to her grew; her selflessness soon made him feel unworthy of the legacy she had left him. It made him wait to unpack, as if he did not deserve to put his things in a home that she had made possible for him to own. The closed boxes, brought in by professional packers and movers, became symbols of his inadequacies—his laziness, selfishness, and hostility, some of which had been directed at his mother—all the flaws he had to hide.
At last, if only to get a glass to fill with obliterating wine, he opened up a box. He pulled out a long-stemmed flute and hastily tore away the newspaper in which it was wrapped. As he was casting aside the yellowing page—from his home, he assumed, and sports, he noticed—he saw its date.
It was, strangely, from around the time of his mother’s inspiring story, twenty years before. He saw that a corner of it was encrusted with a dot of dried-up liquid-solid mix.
Rick sat on the floor, though a chair and couch were available: he didn’t even think to have that wine. It had been he who had placed the paper on the subway floor and saved a page as keepsake, he who had helped the sickened stranger.
He scrambled open another box, and then another, until he found his folder of meticulously kept bills and receipts. In the middle was a familiar looking, shabby ticket from the shoe store, dated from two years before, and stamped “Sold.”
He had dealt the anecdote when he was strapped for funds—when he was poor and yet still principled enough to turn down his mother’s cash. The selling—a reverse procedure, an incision and withdrawal performed under vaguely unsanitary conditions in the store’s back room—was meant to take away his memory not only of the incident but its removal. This was why the shoe store had seemed familiar. It had been a faulty process, and left him with a shard of knowledge.
Had the shoe repair man remembered his face and returned the story to him? Was that what he had really been “paying us for?" And how many other such incidents of charity had he hocked?
Rick didn’t know. He only knew that it was his own good will he should have been celebrating. Whether he inherited her wealth or not, he was as far away from his mother as the living were from the dead. With new tears—the “cry for happy” kind he’d heard so much about—he began to unpack for real, to fill the empty space with the things of himself, those of a man who could show love to others and so was worthy of receiving it.
It took several weeks until the rooms were fully furnished. In that time, he took two steps to truly right his life: made inquiries about starting a foundation for the poor with his inheritance and asked out a bright, attractive woman who worked in the city agency he had approached.
“It’s been awhile since I’ve been on a date,” said this Sandra, who was a saucy type. “I’m rusty. I’ll have to remember all my charming anecdotes.”
“I’m looking forward,” Rick said, “to hearing them.”
He was to meet her for dinner that night. It was his first date in months, as well, too many months for him to count: he felt nervous and excited.
To calm himself, in the half hour before he left, he surfed TV. Then he saw something sitting beside the set: the unopened box of Jean Calot’s old films.
It seemed amusing and appropriate to pop one in. He chose the best-known of the actor’s many hits, a film considered classic that he was convinced he’d never seen: “La Derniere Histoire,” made forty years before.
The black-and-white print was pristine. Even though Rick had neglected to turn on the subtitles, the story started simply. In Paris, a young and handsome, mug-faced Calot was commuting home from his laborer’s job. When he boarded a train, the good-natured hero saw a pretty girl seated opposite him. She wore a balloon on her wrist and a pleasant but queasy expression. As she suddenly and unsteadily rose, her face grew grim and her eyes wide. Rick saw the newspaper folded beneath Calot’s arm. He rushed to hit the stop but hit the pause instead and, before it could occur, froze the incident forever.
Rick sank to his knees and covered his face, to escape the truth. The newspaper had belonged to the movers; its stain was food from some forgotten meal. He had never behaved—never cared enough about another person to behave—in such a way. He had been touched and inspired by an incident from someone else’s mind, sold a story from a story, lived in other people’s glossy dreams. And if he had marketed other such instances, they had been similarly purloined.
He was a creature from his mother’s lap, the little dog that she fed scraps. It was the story, the only story, of his life.
NOTE: Anecdote currently available. Ask for Lot #731. Categories: Family/Values; Funny/Sad; Ugly/Beautiful.
