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my mother and this man, Lyle, had been at Oxford at the same time. On the strength of this coincidence he’d asked her out. Plenty of men have asked my mother out and she always said No. For some reason, this time she agreed. On Saturday night she appeared in the living room with her hair swept up, wearing the red shawl my father bought for her in Peru. “How do I look?” she asked. She looked beautiful, but somehow it didn’t seem fair to wear it. There wasn’t time to say anything because right then Lyle arrived at the front door, panting. He made himself comfortable on the sofa. I asked him if he knew anything about wilderness survival, and he said, “Absolutely.” I asked him if he knew the difference between hemlock and wild carrots, and he gave me a blow-by-blow account of the final moments of an Oxford regatta during which his boat pulled forward to win during the last three seconds. “Holy cow,” I said, in a way that could have been interpreted as sarcastic. Lyle also recalled fond memories of punting on the Cherwell. My mother said she wouldn’t know since she never punted on the Cherwell. I thought, Well I’m not surprised.
After they left, I stayed up watching a TV program about the albatrosses of Antarctica: they can go years without touching the ground, sleep aloft in the sky, drink sea water, cry out the salt, and return year after year to raise babies with the same mate. I must have fallen asleep because when I heard my mother’s key in the lock it was almost one am. A few curls had fallen down around her neck and her mascara was smudged, but when I asked her how it went she said she knew orangutans with whom she could carry on more exciting conversations.
About a year later Bird fractured his wrist trying to leap off our neighbor’s balcony, and the tall, stooped doctor who treated him in the emergency room asked my mother on a date. Maybe it was because he made Bird smile even though his hand was turned at a terrible angle from his wrist, but for the second time since my father died my mother said Yes. The doctor’s name was Henry Lavender, which I thought boded well (Alma Lavender!). When the doorbell rang, Bird streaked down the stairs naked but for his cast, put “That’s Amore” on the record player, and streaked back up. My mother shot down the stairs not wearing her red shawl and pulled up the needle. The record gave out a screech. It spun noiselessly on the turntable while Henry Lavender came in and accepted a glass of cold white wine, and told us about his collection of seashells, many of which he’d dove for himself on trips to the Philippines. I imagined our future together in which he would take us on diving expeditions, the four of us smiling at each other through our masks under the sea. The next morning, I asked my mother how it had gone. She said he was a perfectly nice man. I saw this as a positive thing, but when Henry Lavender called that afternoon my mother was at the supermarket and didn’t call him back. Two days later he made another attempt. This time my mother was going for a walk in the park. I said, “You’re not going to call him back, are you?” and she said, “No.” When Henry Lavender called a third time, she was engrossed in a book of stories, repeatedly exclaiming that the author should be given a Posthumous Nobel. My mother is always giving out Posthumous Nobels. I slipped into the kitchen with the portable. “Dr. Lavender?” I said. And then I told him that I thought my mother actually liked him and even though a normal person would probably be very happy to talk to him and even go out again, I’d known my mother for eleven and a half years and she’d never done anything normal.
21. I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST THAT SHE HADN’T MET THE RIGHT PERSON
     
The fact that she stayed home all day in her pajamas translating books by mostly dead people didn’t seem to help matters much. Sometimes she would get stuck on a certain sentence for hours and go around