Black & White by Dani Shapiro Page B

the far side of the living room, her wheelchair parked beneath a large lime-green vintage poster of a devil wrapped around a Tanqueray bottle. In the polished surroundings of Robin’s living room, with its white art-deco sofas and Regency chairs, yards and yards of shimming silk curtains spilling artfully to the floor, Ruth looks small and lost.
    “Mom.” Clara walks over to her. “Robin didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
    Ruth shakes her head. Her chin is trembling.
    “She was just trying to protect the kids,” Clara goes on. The wrong thing to say, judging from the way Ruth sinks deeper into her wheelchair.
    “Please. All Robin’s done for the past ten years is try to protect those children from me.” Ruth pauses, takes a ragged breath. “As if I’m some kind of monster.”
    “Well, you can see that they don’t feel that way about you—you’re their grandmother,” Clara says, blindly trying to soothe. What is she saying? So hypocritical. Sam’s face floats before her. Eyes accusing, mouth trembling with confusion.
    “Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day,” Ruth says bitterly. “That’s exactly how many times a year I see them. At parties—surrounded by hundreds of people.”
    Clara is just hoping the tide doesn’t turn toward her now. And what about you? You left me—for all these years.
    “This is too hard,” says Ruth. “I want to go home.”
    “Nonsense,” says Robin, startling them both. Clara hadn’t heard her approaching, in her soft velvet slippers. “We’re about to have dessert.”
    Ruth just keeps staring at some invisible point in space, as if she sees something in the air in front of her. A vision, a ghost. The color has drained from her cheeks, the wine-induced euphoria gone in an instant.
    “Look, Robin. I can take Mom back to her apartment,” Clara says. “If that’s what she wants.”
    A long-forgotten familiar look crosses Robin’s face. Ah, she sees. Clara is here now. Clara, who will fulfill her role as the favorite daughter and do her mother’s bidding.
    “I guess I thought—” Ruth begins. Then she stops, squeezes her eyes shut, summoning the words. She tries again. “I don’t have much time left to see you all—to make sense of you.”
    “What exactly did the doctor say?” asks Robin, ever practical.
    “I wanted to be able to fix you in my mind,” continues Ruth. Her voice gets softer and softer until it’s almost an echo of itself. “So I can take you with me when I go. Like those carvings they find on the insides of caves, those carved figures that have been there for thousands of years—”
    “What are you saying?” asks Robin. She sounds just like she did when she was five years old. Mommy, you’re not making any sense.
    Clara’s breath catches. It all makes sense to her, of course. She has always understood. Ruth lives for the images in her mind—she has never been able to live for anything else. For a long time, Clara was that image. And during those darkest, most golden years, her mother lived for her.
    “Mama?” Elliot’s voice, calling from the dining room. “The ice cream’s melting!”
    “Coming, sweetheart,” Robin calls over her shoulder. She turns to her mother. “Please. This isn’t easy for any of us. Let’s try again.”
    Ruth nods, almost imperceptibly. And the three of them—the Dunne women—go slowly back to the table.

 
     

     
    Chapter Four
     
    R UTH’S APARTMENT is abuzz with activity, just as it has always been—but now, instead of assistants and interns, ringing phones, and FedEx deliveries, there is a revolving door of home aides. Clara has hired them through an agency—despite Ruth’s feeble protests that she can manage just fine. In the past two and a half weeks, there have already been a series of them: women exhausted by jobs that usually come to an end when the person they are caring for dies.
    She’s too difficult, one of them said, before she quit on her second day.
    Nobody talks to me