Smiling as she woke, the dream fresh in her mind, she heard her eleven-year-old daughter, Carrie, knocking around in the kitchen. She pushed out of bed; she wanted to be on the road to New York by nine, so that she and Carrie would arrive at the nursing home when it was still morning. This was the best time to visit Sal, before the afternoon closed around him like a thick muffler, and he subsided into a fitful sleep.

Sal would be ninety-four in August, but Anna doubted he would make it to his birthday. He had been her only living grandparent for so long, she found it hard to imagine he would not be there forever. Yet already he had shriveled and curled into someone she hardly recognized, like a stained, torn jacket that has lost most of its original shape.

“Com’e il fondo della pista di lancio?” Carrie stood in the doorway, smiling at Anna.

“Well?” She put her hands on her hips.

“It’s too early for Italian.”

“Come on, Mom, I’ll bet it’s because you don’t know. Com’e il fondo della pista di lancio? What’s your answer?”

“Com’e is ‘how,’ right? How have you found your lance? Fine, my lance is absolutely fine,” Anna said boldly.

“Absolutely wrong. The question means, ‘how is the surface of the runway?’ You haven’t been studying,” Carrie frowned.

“I’ve been busy.”

“You’ll never learn if you don’t study,” Carrie said, sounding like Anna herself.

After buying an Italian phrase book for World War II GIs at the used-book table of a church bazaar, she’d decided that she and her mother would both learn Italian, the language of Sal’s ancestors.

When Anna pointed out that the book’s vocabulary was somewhat specialized, Carrie countered that it would come in handy someday to be able to say barbed wire, or battery, or Stop the bleeding!’ when they traveled in Italy. Besides, they could act out plays, in which Carrie was a wounded American airman and Anna a beautiful Milanese nurse who would respond to every perfectly pronounced phrase with infinite tenderness. So far, Carrie had been wounded alla gola, allo stomaco, and alla caviglia, and Anna had gotten by with exclaiming “mama mia” several times and stroking her forehead.

“I’m going to take a shower,” Anna said.

“Dove c’e dell acqua?” Carrie asked.

“The water’s in the bathroom. Put some cheese and fruit and bread in a bag and make sure your things are ready.”

“Bread and cheese. That’s the kind of lunch they eat in Italy, right?”

“Not rye bread,” Anna said, but Carrie was gone. She moved quickly when there was something to do. In fact, everything about Carrie was quick: her mind, her energy, the way her body grew. Sometimes Anna felt baffled by the speed. She felt as if she were losing Carrie faster than she was getting to know her.

In the shower, Anna let the warm water flow down her back as she thought about her grandfather. Like Carrie, Sal too was disappearing before her eyes. Almost in defiance, she had begun to plunder her memories.

When Anna was three, her mother had gone back to work as a nurse, leaving the widowed Sal to watch Anna. He was a big man then, nearly six feet tall, with a massive neck and shoulders, and black curly hair going gray. He’d owned a restaurant in Brooklyn, but after her grandmother died, he sold it and took a small apartment on Long Island near his daughters.

During the day, Sal made bread, letting Anna knead the dough and shape the loaves. He baked anise biscotti, filling the house with a licorice smell. “Learn the secrets of flour,” Sal advised, “and you can please everyone.” And Anna had become a talented baker, cakes her specialty. She dazzled Carrie and her friends at birthday parties.

Sal taught her the words to Cole Porter songs, banging Porter’s music out on the upright piano in the living room. Self-taught, he played with a quirky rhythm. He also taught her seven card stud; but no matter how much he coached her, she was terrible at cards. She believed in the magic of each hand and would bet everything on a pair of kings. They kept a running tally. By the time she was nine, she owed him twelve million dollars.

“Anybody can win,” Sal would console her. “What you’re doing is harder —learning to lose.” He made it sound like something to be proud of. Anna had, in fact, become a graceful loser. But now she wondered if anybody ever really lost well, or liked it, or merely learned faster and better than others that losing most things was inevitable.

Anna’s favorite memories were of watching baseball games on the television with Sal. She sat in his lap and sipped a Coke while he explained each play. He’d been an ardent Dodgers fan, but after the team left Brooklyn, he accepted the inevitable and followed the New York Mets. When Carrie was five, and Sal eighty-seven, Anna found them huddled together one day, Sal explaining base hits on a paper napkin. He taught Carrie the mechanics of the game, and must have passed on some of the spirit. By the time she was eight, Carrie was reading the sports page every day—and, since they lived in New Jersey, she was a Mets fan too.

Carrie was more like Sal than Anna had ever been. Dark-haired, strong-boned, she played soccer and softball and roller skated with grace. She was fearless and always planning projects: how to build a tree house from scrap lumber and aluminum foil, how to make lemonade with mint and honey. She wanted to paint their living room ceiling to look like the interior of the U.S. Capitol dome.

Anna used to wonder how a careful, quiet person like herself had produced such a child, but now she knew they made a good team. Sometimes Carrie needed Anna’s steady patience to anchor her, and, Carrie, in turn, made life interesting. Anna was a school librarian, a job she chose so she could have more time with her daughter. They spent winter afternoons baking Sal’s secret recipes. On summer days, they swam or painted Carrie’s walls with silver stars.

When Anna brought the suitcase to her car, Carrie was loading two albums and a shoebox into the back seat.

“You’re not bringing your entire baseball card collection?”

“It’s a car, not a plane. You can take all kinds of stuff. And they’re yours, Mom, when you were a kid and collected Mets players. From the 1980s,” she added, making that sound like the far distant past.

“Do you have to bring so many?”

“I thought Grandpa would like looking at them. Maybe he can tell me about the players.” Dwight Gooden, Darryl Strawberry, Keith Hernandez: Anna felt the distance of her own memories.

Carrie’s kindness was persuasive. It was difficult to disagree with a child who expressed herself thoughtfully, didn’t whine, and could also ask “where is the troopship?” in a foreign language. Anna shrugged, and Carrie smiled; she was a well-mannered winner.

By 7:20, they were driving north on I-95.  Anna liked to travel with her daughter, who had never been noisy or restless in the car like other kids. If a ball game was on, they listened to it. Sometimes they sang Cole Porter, Gershwin, and Irving Berlin, songs Sal had taught Anna and Anna had passed on to her daughter. Today Carrie flipped a few album pages, reading the stats.

She turned suddenly to Anna. “Why didn’t you name me Tiffany?”

“Tiffany? Are you kidding? It’s the name of a jewelry store. It’s the name of a lamp.”

“It’s a beautiful name. Carrie’s a verb. It’s weird being a verb.”

“You’re not a verb; you’re Caroline, after your great-grandmother.”

“Then why don’t you call me that?”

“You want me to call you Caroline?”

“No, I want you to call me Tiffany.”

“Well, forget it.” Anna glanced at her daughter, now frowning in the passenger seat. “When you grow up and have a baby girl, you can name her Tiffany. Then she’ll grow up and complain that she’d rather be called Margaret.”

“I doubt it.” Carrie was as certain of her future as she was of her present. She chiseled away at problems with the imagination and force of her character, shaping the world as she thought it ought to be. She changed the names of all the heroes and heroines in stories to Carrie and changed the endings when they didn’t suit her. There was no woodcutter in her daughter’s “Red Riding Hood.” Red Carrie Hood took care of the wolf herself.

“Is it true Grandpa is dying?”

“Maybe.” Anna surprised herself by hesitating. “That’s something we can’t know for sure.” But of course she knew. It was palpable in every line of Sal’s body.

“How do you know?” Carrie reached in the food bag for an apple.

“Know what?”

“When you’re dying. It must be creepy. Do you get weaker and weaker, like some vampire’s sucking out your blood?”

“Carrie!”

“How do you know it’s not like that?”

“There are no vampires on Long Island.”

“I didn’t say there were.” Carrie frowned at her apple. “I just said it could feel that way. All your energy draining away. It must be awful.”

“Yes. If it’s like that, it must be.”

“What I really want to know is, what’s it like right when you die? That second. Do you know that you’re dead?”

“You ask the strangest questions.”

“I don’t think it’s strange. I’ll bet Grandpa thinks about it all the time.”

“I don’t think he does,” Anna said truthfully. Like his body, Sal’s mind had weakened.

“And the answer is, I don’t know. Nobody does.”

“You must have theories. Everybody has theories.”

“Theories,” Anna repeated. “Well, some people think there’s a great, shining light and when you move toward it you find that all the friends and relatives who died before you are waiting for you.”

“That might not be so nice,” Carrie said quickly. “I mean, what if you’d waited all your life to get rid of your mother . . .”

“Excuse me?”

“OK, not your mother, your uncle, and there he is showing up to spend forever with you.”

“Maybe dying made him more appealing.”

“Maybe. But I’m not sure I like that theory. Although the shining light part would be nice, like Christmas, or magic.”

“I like that part too.”

Carrie nibbled the apple. “Tell me some others.”

“Well, there’s reincarnation. Maybe when you die, your soul goes straight to a cool, dark room until it can come back in the body of a kitten or a grasshopper. Or a senator.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“You wanted theories, remember?”

“I’ve got one,” Carrie said, leaning forward. “Maybe one minute you’re alive, and the next you’re dead, and you don’t know. You just lie there, and you don’t know.”

Anna was silent.

“Well, what do you think? Is that possible?”

Anna concentrated on the highway lane markings.

“Mom,” Carrie nudged her. “Come on. Do you think it’s possible?”

“It’s possible,” Anna said finally. “Yes, I think it’s possible.”

She pulled into the nursing home parking lot at 11:15. As Carrie unfolded herself from the car and stretched, Anna realized how tall she was for an eleven-year-old—already five feet two and still growing. She was bound to be taller than Anna.

Anna squared her shoulders, facing the entrance to the home.

“Is he really sick?” Carrie asked, sounding tentative for the first time.

“Not sick, exactly,” Anna said. “Just sort of weak, and—smaller. And you know his memory’s not so good. He doesn’t talk much. But he’s still Sal. It will be okay.”

“I know that, Mom.” Carrie sounded like herself again. “Let’s go.”

They walked through two hallways, with small rooms opening off to each side. People sat, some silently, some murmuring. Nurses walked by. They found Sal in a wheelchair in a sunny alcove by a window, and Carrie rushed to kiss him, dumping her baseball card albums and box on the floor.

Anna followed slowly. Sal looked unbelievably tiny under a colorful afghan, even smaller than when she’d seen him last. The light caught the pinkness of his scalp through his cropped hair. His face was calm and vacant. He stirred when Carrie touched him, but didn’t seem to recognize her. She looked up at Anna, puzzled. “His hands are so cold, Mom. Are you sure he’s not sick?”

“He’s not sick,” Anna said. He’s just dying, she thought. This is how you know when you’re dying, Carrie. When everything you know about the world recedes to an invisible point, leaving you still and empty.

“We’re here, Grandpa,” Anna said, kissing him on the forehead. “Anna and Carrie. This is Carrie. Remember how you taught her all about baseball, the same way you did me?”

Sal cocked his head, listening for the source of the sound. He said nothing. Anna almost wished that he’d died sooner. Her chest tightened to see him so diminished.

“Hey, Grandpa, guess what?” Carrie said, clinging to his hand. “Mom and I are learning Italian. Well, I am at least.” Carrie glanced disapprovingly at Anna. “Mom’s behind on her studying.”

Sal coughed.

“Sono stato avvelenato,” Carrie pronounced distinctly. “Isn’t that neat? It means, ‘I have been poisoned.’” She clutched her throat and staggered backwards. Sal blinked.

Carrie lowered herself, gazing into Sal’s face. “Do you remember any Italian? Mom said you used to teach it to her when she was little, but she didn’t want to learn.”

“Anna,” Sal said suddenly and clearly. Anna knew that he could mean his dead sister, that he could be repeating a sound he had heard a few moments ago and just now processed, but she was thrilled. She wanted to hold the word forever, even as it slipped through the air.

“That’s right,” Carrie said, grinning. “Mom. She was never great at languages.”

“Mama mia,” said Anna.

“See what I mean?” Carrie reached to open the album of cards on the floor, placing it on Sal’s lap. He touched it absently. “Look,” she said brightly, “I’ve brought these baseball cards for us to look at.” Sal let Carrie lay his hand on the cards.

As Anna watched them both, she realized it was the drift of time that bothered her most: the almost effortless way the future seemed to flow into the past, leaving only a ripple that was here and now. There was no set pattern or plan to the way she had grown away from Sal, or Carrie was moving from her. It was nothing but the natural drift of time.

When she had called Sal on Sundays from college, or later, when Carrie was young, she sometimes wished there were more to say. She didn’t want to talk about Aunt Shirley’s illnesses, or the weather, or Carrie’s progress in walking and talking; she wanted to recapture some secret language they had shared.

She thought Sal must miss something too, during those calls. Yet he always sounded happy just to hear her voice. For years he saved all the postcards she sent, taping them to the kitchen wall. He mailed her birthday cards written in his loopy, old-fashioned hand, and she’d had one letter from him, on her twenty-fifth birthday.

“Do you remember when we used to make cookies together?” Sal wrote. “You are a woman now. My God, the years go by so fast, I feel it at night, but I still have my health. I beat the pants off the other guys in seven card stud, we play at the recreation center for senior citizens!! Do you believe they are older than me? That’s old. You’ve got to use your head, you’ve got to bet on the right cards. When you come, I’ll bake your favorite cake, chocolate. I love you. Grandpa.”

“Dwight Gooden, Grandpa.” Carrie pointed to one of the cards. “He was a pitcher for your team, the Mets. And here’s Keith Hernandez. He was a first baseman. Mom thinks he’s cute.”

Sal nodded aimlessly. Anna wished he would talk about Aunt Shirley or the weather now, but he was silent.

Anna had saved Sal’s letter, and his birthday cards, along with Carrie’s drawings, the remnants of her endless projects. It seemed so little to set against her losses. She wanted to apologize to Sal for all the years apart, but it was too late. She wanted to comfort her younger self, but that self was gone.

She concentrated on her grandfather and her daughter who were here, now, in front of her: Sal’s thin fingers lying against the old cards; Carrie’s voice, sweet and authoritative, with a tone in it Anna had not noticed before. She felt tears sting her eyes at the sound of that voice repeating patiently to Sal the things he had once told Anna as a child; at the sight of him staring placid and unseeing into the bright afternoon light; at the way they both continued to curve away from Anna, each in a different direction, towards places she couldn’t reach and whose finality she was just beginning to understand.

Stories Never More Timely, A Perfect Gift for the Holidays

In Any Given Room

Stories on the Indian Experience

by I. D. Kapur

  “Indra Kapur’s writing is illuminating, entertaining, and perceptive, gracing each topic with beauty and wit that leaves you both completely satisfied and wanting more.” Katherine Longshore, author of the Gilt series “Indra Kapur’s courage in embracing and committing her life to another culture is clear. Her stories delight, break our hearts, and show us an India most of us have never seen before.” Ann Saxton Reh, author of the David Markam mysteries. “These stories deftly capture the nuances and contradictions of their well-drawn characters, many from India, in a range of intriguing and dramatic situations.” Jack Adler, author of The Tides of Faith and other novels. Available on Amazon and from you independent book store.

Find this and more in ArtsMart