Family Furnishings Practice IOC

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Alfrida’s—she must have married. And I couldn’t recall Alfrida’s ever mentioning any of her half family by their first names. 

I asked how Alfrida was, and the woman said her own eyesight was so bad that she was legally blind. And she had a serious kidney problem, which meant that she had to be on dialysis twice a week.

“Other than that—?” she said, and laughed. I thought, yes, a sister,because I could hear something of Alfrida in that reckless, tossed laugh.

“So she doesn’t travel too good,” she said. “Or else I would’ve brought her. She still gets the paper from here and I read it to her sometimes. That’s where I saw about your dad.”

I wondered out loud, impulsively, if I should go to visit, at the nursing home. The emotions of the funeral—all the warm and relieved and reconciled feelings opened up in me by the death of my father at a reasonable age—prompted this suggestion. It would have been hard to carry out. My husband—my second husband— and I had only two days here before we were flying to Europe on an already delayed holiday.

“I don’t know if you’d get so much out of it,” the woman said. “She has her good days. Then she has her bad days. You never know. Sometimes I think she ’s putting it on. Like, she ’ll sit there all day and whatever anybody says to her, she’ll just say the same thing. Fit as a fiddle and ready for love. That’s what she’ll say all day long. Fit-as-a-fiddle-and-ready-for-love.  She’ll drive you crazy. Then other days she can answer all right.”

— 114 —

Again, her voice and laugh—this time half submerged— reminded me of Alfrida, and I said, “You know I must have met you, I remember once when Alfrida’s stepmother and her father dropped in, or maybe it was only her father and some of the children—”

“Oh, that’s not who I am,” the woman said. “You thought I was Alfrida’s sister? Glory. I must be looking my age.”

I started to say that I could not see her very well, and it was true. In October the afternoon sun was low, and it was coming straight into my eyes. The woman was standing against the light, so that it was hard to make out her features or her expression.

She twitched her shoulders nervously and importantly. She said, “Alfrida was my birth mom.”

Mawm. Mother.