Book Reviewers Wanted

Get a free book in return for a 600-1200 word review. Send resume and clippings

email:
submissions@nycfreepress.com

Advertise with
Us

Email or call us at
718-601-2258
for more information

email:
adinfo@nycfreepress.com

Journey to Pine Lake
By Peter Baida

At forty-nine, Gloria's mother was dying. That shouldnít have mattered much to Gloria, who hadn't even seen her mother in four years. But, somehow, it did matter.

Geography complicated the situation. Gloria's mother was dying in a town named Pine Lake, twenty miles west of Nashville. Gloria herself lived in New Orleans, four hundred miles to the south, and her sister Rose lived in Seattle.
Gloria was twenty-nine and worked in a job any bright ten-year-old could do. Rose was thirty-two and worked as a corporate lawyer. Yet Rose had found time to visit their mother twice in the past two months. Gloria hadn't even known that her mother was sick until Rose told her.

"Gloria, when are you going to see her?" Rose said now, on the phone from Seattle.
"I don't know. I'm not sure I want to see her," Gloria said.
"This is your mother. You only have one mother."
"I'll go when I'm ready."
"When youíre ready? She's got liver cancer. Don't you know what that means?"
Gloria knew. But what was she supposed to do, start feeling sorry for her mother just because she had liver cancer?

The truth was, Gloria's mother was probably Gloria's least favorite person in the entire world. Oh, there were other people Gloria disliked, like ... like Hitler. Would Gloria have visited Hitler if Hitler were dying? No way. So why should she visit her mother?

That was what went through Gloria's mind, as Rose hammered away at her. What she said was, "Don't worry. I'll go. It's just that, you know, I've got to prepare myself."
*
At the New Orleans airport, waiting for the plane, Gloria consumed a beer, an oyster po-boy, french fries, and a chocolate donut. She'd been eating like a pig ever since she called her mother and scheduled the trip.

Gloria squeezed into a window seat on the plane. A stout woman with silver hair and an enormous fudge-brown pocketbook sat down next to her.
"If you ask me, it's murder, plain and simple," the woman said to Gloria.
Gloria looked at the woman, but did not say anything, since she had no idea what the woman was talking about.

The woman pointed at an article in the newspaper Gloria was reading. “Abortion," the woman said. "Just thinking about it makes me want to pick up a gun and shoot somebody."

Gloria herself had had two abortions, one at the age of nineteen and one at twenty-three. It wasn't a subject she liked to talk about.
"I know how you feel," Gloria said, meaning that she knew how it felt to want to shoot somebody. At the moment, she wanted to shoot the stout woman.
"My name's Elvira--Elvira Zimmerman," the woman said, beaming at Gloria and holding out her hand. "And that's Frank, my husband." She gestured in the direction of the silver-haired man in the aisle seat, who already had fastened his seatbelt, thrown back his head, and fallen asleep.

"Gloria Miller. Pleased to meet you," Gloria said.
"We're going to Nashville for a wedding," Elvira said. "You wouldn't happen to be going to the Wrenn wedding, now would you?"
"I'm going to see my mother," Gloria said.

"Oh! That's nice," Elvira Zimmerman said, in a voice so full of feeling that it made Gloria want to shrivel up and die. Why was she talking to this woman? What she ought to do, Gloria thought, was to stick her nose back in the newspaper--she'd been reading an article about a woman who cut off her husband's testicles, not the article about abortion--and keep it there for the rest of the flight. Yes, just shut her mouth and stick her nose back in the newspaper. While these thoughts drifted through her head, Gloria was surprised to hear herself saying:
"She's dying."
"Your mother?"
"Yes."
"Oh, you poor dear!"
"We've never really been close."
"Oh, you poor, poor dear!"
Wasn't there any way to make Elvira Zimmerman shut up?
"Actually, we haven't seen one another in years. We sort of can't stand one another."

That did it. Elvira looked as if a door had slammed in her face.
When the stewardess came round with snacks and drinks, Gloria asked for Scotch on the rocks and two little bags of pretzels. With that, plus the small box of M&Ms she'd brought on the flight, she managed to get to the Nashville airport without starving, though she wolfed down a hot dog as soon as she got off the plane.

*
In a rented wine-red Acura, Gloria headed for Pine Lake. It was four o'clock on a fiercely hot afternoon. On the car radio, somebody was singing a song called

"She Got the Gold Mine, I Got the Shaft."
The attendant at a Texaco station told Gloria how to find Tremont Street. Gloria drove there and parked. At number 33, a heavy-set woman in a blue housedress with a pattern of white and pink roses on it was rocking on a porch chair.
"Mrs. Argerakis?"
"That's me," the woman said.
"I'm Gloria. Irene Miller's daughter."
Gloria's mother rented an apartment on the second-floor of the Argerakis house. Mrs. Argerakis took Gloria upstairs, opened the apartment for her, showed her in, and left her with the key.

Dreary--that was the word for the apartment. A dreary sofa, two dreary chairs, a chipped and dreary coffee table, dreary curtains, a cluttered and dreary bedroom, a dimly lit kitchen with an ancient refrigerator, humming in one corner.
After fifteen minutes in the apartment, Gloria grabbed her purse, sped downstairs, and drove off in search of a place to eat.

*

"Wilson," he said. "Clint Wilson."
Cute was the word for Clint Wilson. He was wearing blue jeans, cowboy boots, and a red-and-green checked shirt. Gloria noticed his belt buckle--a head of Teddy Roosevelt.

They had met in a roadside joint named Heaven's Gate, where Gloria had decided to have supper. It was a dark place, more bar than restaurant, with about a dozen people in it.
"You from around here?" Clint asked.
"New Orleans. I'm here to see my mother."
Clint ignored the reference to her mother. "New Orleans. I been there once," he said.
"She's got liver cancer."
"That's some city. I bet you have some good times."
"Irene Miller, her name is. She's got her own catering business."
"Well, that's fine. I like a woman that works.î
"She's dying now. Liver cancer."

Clint Wilson reminded Gloria of a man she once knew who wanted to be a rock-and-roll singer. He had wound up working in a store that sold mattresses. His name was Michael, but Gloria thought of him as Mick--Mick the Mattress King.
"Dance?" Clint Wilson asked.
Gloria got up and started dancing with him. The music was slow, and there were two other couples on the floor.
The last time Gloria had slept with a man had been about a month ago. He was a tourist from Detroit, a hospital administrator, who had picked her up in the French Quarter.
"What you do in New Orleans?" Clint said.
"Flowers."
"Flowers?"
"I take orders for flowers. You know--somebody's sick, or dead, and you call a florist. I'm the person who takes the order."

Clint's hand was making slow circles where her butt began to curve, and then it moved up under her shirt and started making slow circles on her bare flesh. One finger sneaked down under her pants. Gloria felt pleasantly stirred. She was thinking that she'd rather spend the night with Clint, wherever Clint lived, than spend it back in her mother's apartment. Then she remembered Mrs. Argerakis. What would Mrs. Argerakis think, and what would she say to her friends in Pine Lake, if Gloria came into town and promptly started acting like a whore?
"I think I'd better head back," Gloria said.
"Back?"
"My mother's sick. I need a good night's rest."

*

The smell of pancakes, drifting up from Mrs. Argerakis's kitchen, wakened Gloria. She stretched and yawned. Lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling, she thought about her mother.

Gloria's mother hadn't always run a crumby little catering business in Pine Lake. Fifteen years ago, when Gloria was a teenager, she'd run a fashionable and highly successful catering business in Baltimore.

She'd been a hard-working, hard-driving woman. She'd had to be, bringing up two kids alone, after Harry Miller, the marine sergeant she'd married, had run off with the wife of an old buddy to start a boating business on the Eastern Shore.
You had it tough, Mom. I've never denied that.

Working long hours, pushing herself, pushing her staff, Irene had built up a gourmet catering business that eventually came to be the top choice of the rich women in Guilford and Roland Park.

You lost track of the kids, Mom, but you built that damned business.
Harry Miller, the man Gloria remembered as her father, had been her mother's second husband. Gloriaís mother had only been seventeen, and unmarried, when Rose was born. The father, Gloriaís mother always said, was "just a kid, just a high-school kid," which, of course, was what Gloriaís mother was, too. There was nothing to say about him, apparently, except that he was a high-school kid who had planted a seed.

Gloria's father, a man named Sam Peters, was a real-estate developer with a gift for buying worthless property. Gloria's mother married him six month before Gloria was born, and he vanished when Gloria was three, in pursuit of whatever Americans pursue when they head for Phoenix.
Blood under the bridge, Mom. It's all blood under the bridge.

Thinking about her mother, with the smell of pancakes rising from Mrs. Argerakis's kitchen, Gloria found herself squinting up at the ceiling, as if to hold back tears, or to make out some message in the cracks.

In Baltimore fifteen years ago, Irene had borrowed money to expand the catering business. Then, without warning, tastes had changed in Guilford and Roland Park. Gourmet food with Mediterranean influence was out, and gourmet food with Thai influence was in.

Irene had fought back, she'd developed her own Thai specialties, she'd come home with the scent of lemon grass and tarmarind on her hands. To no avail. She saw the business going down the tubes, and her life with it.
That was when she'd decided to steal.

*

“Mary?” The question came from a very old woman in a wheelchair, sitting in the shadows in the corridor at the hospice where Gloria was looking for her mother’s room.
Pardon?” Gloria said.
“ You’re Mary, aren’t you?”
“ I’m sorry. I’m Gloria.”
“ It’s nice of you to come, Mary.”
“ I’m Gloria.”
“ I’ve missed you, Mary.”
Gloria retreated, shaking her head. Around the corner, she found the room she was looking for.

Her mother, looking closer to seventy than to forty-nine, lay on her back in bed, in gray slacks and a pale yellow jersey, with her eyes closed. Her face was wrinkled and drained of color. Her arms were bruised where needles had assaulted her veins.

Gloria sat down and waited. After fifteen minutes that seemed like hours, her mother opened her eyes.
“Hi, Mom.”
Gloria?
ìI told you I was coming. Remember?”

“It’s about time.”
“ Let’s not fight, Mother.”
“ Why shouldn’t we fight? We always fight.”
Gloria walked over to the bed and gave her mother a kiss on the cheek.

in Baltimore fifteen years ago, with two teenage daughters to support and a business on the edge of bankruptcy, Irene had grown more and more desperate. Finally she’d arranged a lunch with a wealthy friend, Harris Elder, the heir to a local department-store fortune, a married man who made no secret of his desire to be more than a friend to Irene.

What Harris did not know, while he flirted with Irene over a lunch of chilled lobster and soft-shell crabs, was that Irene had recently seduced the superintendent in his luxury apartment building, and that the superintendent, in appreciation, had agreed to permit another one of Ireneís friends, an aspiring actor, to enter Harrisís apartment while Harris wooed Irene. The actor departed with sketches by Matisse and Picasso, an antique clock, a gold money clip, and other jewelry.

“ Here, I brought some flowers,” Gloria said to her mother, holding out the arrangement of pink and violet tulips she’d bought in the gift shop downstairs.
“ Thanks. Put ‘em down.”

With an impatient wave of her hand, Irene indicated that she didn’t care much about flowers. Gloria put the vase on the windowsill.
Irene lifted herself higher in bed, looked at Gloria, and waited.
“ Well,” Gloria said. “Here we are.”
“ You’ve put on weight,” Irene said.
“ After four years, the first thing you say is that Iíve put on weight?”
“ It’s true, isn’t it?”
Gloria did not answer.
“ What did you want me to do, tell you how much fun it is to lie here with my liver rotting?”
“ We could talk about that if you want, Mother.

“Well, I don’t want.”
Why did I come here? Gloria wondered. What did I think I was going to accomplish?
“ I’m up crap’s creek,” Irene said. “You know what that means?“
” I guess I can figure it out.”

In Baltimore fifteen years ago, the superintendent had told the police everything when they informed him that a tenant had seen Irene leaving his apartment several weeks before the robbery. Gloria would never forget the day her motherís photograph had appeared on the front page of the newspaper, along with an article describing how, police charged, her mother had seduced the superintendent and conspired with the young actor (who also was her lover) to steal art and jewelry from the apartment of Harris Elder.
In school, in her ninth-grade classes, Gloria had felt that everyone was watching her, whispering about her, accusing her.

After Irene was sentenced to five years in prison, Rose and Gloria had gone to live with their Aunt Julia, on a little street of aging, semidetached brick houses, in northeast Baltimore. Rose, three years older, had escaped Baltimore the year after the scandal. For Gloria, the sense of shame and humiliation had continued to burn--through ninth grade, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth. Only when she left Baltimore at the age of eighteen, to take a job as a waitress in Annapolis, where she had a boy friend at the time, a gasoline station attendant whom now she could barely remember--only when she left Baltimore had Gloria begun to feel that she was not constantly watched and whispered about.

“You didn’t have to come” Irene said now. “I know I haven’t been much of a mother.”

“Don’t worry about it,“ Gloria said.
“ Not that you’ve been any great shakes as a daughter.”
“ Terrific. Let’s talk about what a lousy daughter I’ve been.”
“ There’s no need to get sarcastic, Gloria.”
“ I can’t help myself. I learned from a master.”
Irene took a few seconds to prepare an answer. Then she said: “What I mean, Gloria, is that a woman of nearly thirty who struggles to get through one whole semester at college, and never works at anything but a dead-end job, and never shacks up with anyone but a loser, is not exactly what a mother dreams about when she’s changing those baby diapers.”

There it was--the bitterness, the lashing and taunting. Had there ever been any reason to imagine that the two of them would connect in any other way? No. Of course not. They’d always flailed at one another. Why should a deathbed make any difference?

Gloria said: “Believe me, Mother, a thief is not what any child dreams about having as a mother.”
“ Is that what’s bothering you? After all these years?”
“ It’s one thing. Yes.”
“ You think it’s easy to be a thief? Try it sometime.”
Gloria stared at her mother.
“ You wouldn’t have the guts”î her mother said.
Gloria said: “You think it’s easy to be the daughter of a thief? Try that sometime.
“ O Christ,” her mother said.
[ A woman who sleeps with the janitor to get what she wants.”
“ The superintendent!”
“ For God’s sake, Mother. What difference does it make?”
“ You bimbo!” Irene had sat up in bed, and her face, so white when Gloria arrived, had turned frighteningly red. “I was losing my business. Don’t you understand what that means? Without that business I was nothing. We were nothing."
Gloria had not wanted the meeting to go like this, but she seemed helpless to avoid the fight. It went on and on, mother and daughter hurling thunderbolts at one another, until finally both of them were exhausted.

“Why did you come?” Irene said at last, falling back on her pillow. “I didn’t need this.”

“I’ll come back tomorrow, Mother. Maybe we’ll do better.”
[ Tomorrow? You’re coming back?”
Gloria turned quickly away, not wanting her mother to see the tears that filled her eyes. Out! Out! Barely able to see, Gloria stumbled into the corridor. She staggered a few steps in the wrong direction, stopped, suppressed a sob, and wiped her eyes with her sleeve.

Where was she? Where was the elevator? Through her tears, Gloria looked around the corridor in confusion. Sensing that sheíd made a wrong turn coming out of her motherís room, she went back, not looking in the room as she passed it. She rounded a corner and collided head on with a man walking toward her.“ìOh! Excuse me!”
“ Excuse me,” the man said, catching her arm to help her keep her balance.
Sniffling, Gloria looked at him out red and puffy eyes, out of her tear-streaked face.
“ Are you all right?” he asked.
“ Yes.... I mean--sort of.”
Gloria paused. The man looked at her. He was a medium-sized man about her own age, not especially good-looking, with dark hair and a crooked nose. He was wearing sand-colored pants and a dark-green polo shirt.
“ I had a fight with my mother,” Gloria said.
“ I’m sorry.” The man hesitated, looking closely at Gloria. Then he said: “I know this may sound strange, but did you happen to talk earlier with an old woman out in this corridor?”

Gloria remembered the old woman she had encountered on her way to her mother’s room. “Why, yes,” she said.
“ Oh! I’m so glad I found you!” the man said. “She’s been talking my ear off, about how she saw Mary out here.”
“ Who’s Mary?”
“ My sister. She’s been dead fifteen years.”
“ I’m sorry.”
“ Thank you. She would have been your age, give or take a couple of years.” The man hesitated. “My name’s Joe. Joe Simms. Could I ask you a favor?”
“ Sure,” Gloria said.
“ Say no if it makes you uncomfortable. I’ll understand.”
“ Okay.”
“ Come see my mother, just for a few minutes. She thinks you’re Mary.”
“ You want me to pretend I’m your sister?”
ìShe’s an old woman dying. What harm would it do?”
What harm would it do? Gloria followed Joe into his mother’s room.
“ Mother! Look who I found!”

The woman looked up from a chair near the window. Mary hesitated in the shadows, on the other side of the room. She watched the old woman lift her head. She watched the old woman squint, struggling to focus. She watched the way the face of the old woman changed, as if light suddenly filled it from within, as if light welled up from an inner source. The sun was blazing behind the battered head, circling it with a fiery orange glow.
“ Mary?” the old woman said.
“ Yes. It’s me,” Gloria said, not quite knowing why.
*

Years later, telling their children how they had met, Gloria and Joe would tell how Gloria had come up from New Orleans to visit her dying mother in the hospice in Pine Lake, and how Joe had come down from New York to visit his dying mother in the same hospice, and how Gloria had fought bitterly with her own mother, and how Joe’s mother had mistaken Gloria for his sister who had died fifteen years earlier, and how Gloria had played along with the deception, if you could call it that, and how Joes mother had gone to her death believing that she’d had a nice visit from the daughter whose death she had forgotten, and a nice chat with her.
The children loved to hear the story, and Joe and Gloria loved to tell it, since it ended with the two of them walking out of the hospice, taking the first steps in their life together, though they’d had no idea, of course, that they were doing anything of the sort, no idea that they were starting a journey together, no idea that they were doing anything but walking together out of the place where both their mothers happened to be dying, in a little town where nothing much seemed to happen, most of the time.

Peter Baida (1950-1999) won the O. Henry Short Story Prize for A Nurse's Story, and his book of short stories, "A Nurse's Story and Others" (University Press of Mississippi), was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

A Baltimore native, he worked for twenty years at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, for much of that time as the director of direct-mail fundraising. Published in The Gettysburg Review, American Literary Review, The New York Times, American Heritage, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic Monthly,and The Free Press, he was the author of both fiction and nonfiction, including his first book, Poor Richard's Legacy: American Business Values from Benjamin Franklin to Donald Trump.