Worn Masks by Phyllis Carito Page B

difficult it was to
see someone you love so ill, but Mary Grace just interrupted her. “Will you
just have someone call me?” Nurse Belinda assured her the hospital would call
her with any change at all in her mother’s condition.
    Mary Grace went back to the house where she had grown up.
Faithfully, there was Aunt Maggie on the porch. “Anything?”
    “No change, they will let us know. You should get some sleep, Aunt
Maggie. I guess I’ll go upstairs.” Mary Grace hesitated, her legs were heavy
and she felt uncertain that she could move them. It was harder walking up the
stairs to her childhood apartment than it had been walking into the ICU room. 
    Mary Grace stared at the empty couch, covered with a gaudy
slipcover, one she had never seen. Mary Grace didn’t remember the colors of the
other flowery pattern slipcovers her mother
had made every few years to re place worn ones. She did remember the
folding metal and the creaking springs. She did remember sheets pinched in the
metal, with blackened grease-stained eyeholes cut open in them.
    She opened the windows and stared at the stained couch in
disbelief. Aunt Maggie and the neighbor had found her mother lying across the
couch. She could see where her mother’s body
had indented the cush ions, foam from her mouth stained one end and there
were body excrements toward the third cushion, landing on both the middle
cushion and the mostly spared, but most worn
last cushion. Mary Grace placed the cush ions into a black plastic bag
and carried it downstairs and outside to the garbage can.
    They said they’d know in twenty-four hours, so she’d have to stay. Mary Grace had established herself as
a sol id editor, had worked steadily for over fifteen years for the same
publishing house, so taking time off or working without going into the office
were not a problem for her. It was a solitary job and she liked it that way.
She was tired and not going to drive the hour to be called and have to turn
around, come back, and finish this. Maybe she was afraid that if she left she
would not be able to make herself come back.
    Mary Grace had been eight years old when she was finally allowed
to turn the couch into a bed each night by herself without anyone’s help. The
evening ritual began when her dad, Luigi, checked the mousetraps, one placed at
the entrance to the living room, discreetly against the wall on the kitchen
side; and another one tucked behind the back of the couch. He removed the carcasses
to the garbage downstairs, and re-baited the traps with rind pieces of
provolone, and he promised Mary Grace that mice could not climb up the back of
the couch.
    But, Mary Grace was clear now that she could not sleep on this
couch again, and would have to just lie down on her father’s side of her
mother’s bed.
    Mary Grace went into the bedroom and heard her mother warning her
and her father, “Maria Graziella, Luigi, you
never sit on the bed!” Her mother’s bed, al ways made with care each
morning after a brief airing, all linens pulled back, after her mother’s
morning bathroom ritual, while the coffee was brewing, she made the bed,
topping it with a bedspread for each season. Once the task was completed the
perfectly smooth bedspread was not to be disturbed by Mary Grace or her father
sitting on it.
    Back at the house the next few evenings after sitting in the
hospital all day, Mary Grace tried to get some work done but she couldn’t
concentrate on the manuscript and she couldn’t stop thinking about the stupid
couch. It was the center of life, even more than the kitchen. It was her secret
bed.
    Even before she was allowed to open it, when it had been her dad
who opened the couch each evening, Mary Grace always wanted to be like the
Castro convertible girl on the television and open it herself. The Castro girl
was as small as Mary Grace and could open the couch. Still, Mom said it was
Dad’s job, and she warned him: “Don’t let it swing down and smash against