Dry Your Smile Read Online Free

Bland. Still, she had been beautiful, and not only to a child’s perception. Even now, I could look at old photographs of her with adult objectivity but admiration. That luminous skin, those fawnlike eyes. The perfect teeth in a radiant smile. No matter what happened, her smile, when beamed full on its fortunate recipient, descended like a blessing.
    Now only the eyes were left—still large, black, clear. Her features had slid almost imperceptibly sideways since the minor stroke. Years of being overweight left sacs of loose flesh on her body, as she grew thinner from loss of appetite, lack of muscle tone, nerve degeneration. Bat-wings of skin swung from her underarms, the color of the flesh a light sepia, the texture like clotted cream. Worst of all were the tremors, because of what they did to her pride. The youngest daughter of immigrants—a former rabbi and his peasant wife, the girl with a lovely voice who had dreamed of becoming an opera singer until told that performing publicly was lower than prostitution, the woman who had been afraid all her youth of poverty and ignominy until a shining precocious daughter came into her life—all that woman ever had was her pride.
    Could she, then, have died of a heart attack—quick, clean? No, she had been cursed with a lingering degenerative disease that could take up to a quarter-century to run its course, one for whom the hallucination-inducing, blood-clot-provoking medication was almost as dangerous as the malady. None of this she acknowledged. She simply tremored. But the pride wouldn’t let her tremble in public—a coffee cup clattering uncontrollably as she set it down in a restaurant, an occasional dribble down the chin, the terrifying unmaneuverability of a street curb. Not quite a recluse yet, she nonetheless had made it clear, unspoken, that she was choosing this path, and when those huge eyes seemed to plead I can suffer pain but not humiliation , I committed myself to respecting her decision. For six years, she had consistently refused to accept the identical diagnoses of three separate doctors. And she still ignored medication. The shoebox kept under her bed brimmed with unfilled prescription slips.
    Now she was flirting by phone with her broker of over three decades. Surely he must know … or was this a reliable, compassionate game between them?
    â€œWell, handsome, before I go out for dinner with you, I’d have to buy something new and very special to wear, no?” She winked at me. Oh those eyes. I couldn’t help winking back. “And I’d need some better dividends for that, don’t you think? So look, you just be a lamb and do what I say, like always. I don’t care what boom might happen if Reagan gets elected in two months. I want blue chips , not those goddamned money markets, you understand? Don’t give me trouble. Don’t make me nervous.”
    Still the manipulator with the eyes of God. And I, a grown woman with a messed-up life of my own, still afraid of her, still afraid for her, still strung taut as a violin string with pity for her, still loving her hopelessly.
    I was grateful for the phone-call interruptions. Little atolls in a pacific of grief, they made these meetings bearable. In another hour I could go. Home to Laurence where nothing was resolved. Abe Gold was right: heavy day, kid. I got up and began to wander around again, as if the room might this time yield a secret exit I’d overlooked for years.
    But I didn’t want to go into the bedroom, where she and I had slept in twin beds right up through my adolescence until I finally left, penniless, but with a secretarial job and at least with a walk-up room of one’s own in Yorkville. No, the bedroom had been turned into some Luis Buñuel version of a shrine: hideous calf-length full skirts of the 1950’s, pastel Capezio shoes, pillbox hats, a dyed-blond beaver coat, a white mink capelet. The dresser boasted my Honor