Zero K by Don DeLillo Page B

Gombrowicz. I wanted to read him in the original. The phrase appealed to me. Read him in the original. Madeline and I at dinner, there we are, some kind of muggy stew in cereal bowls, I’m fourteen or fifteen and keep repeating the name softly, Gombrowicz, Witold Gombrowicz, seeing it spelled out in my head and saying it, first name and last—how could you not love it—until my mother elevates her gaze from the bowl and delivers a steely whisper, Enough .
    She was adept at knowing what time it was. No wristwatch, no clock in view. I might test her, without warning, when we were taking a walk, she and I, block by block, and she was always able to report the time within a three- or four-minute margin of variation. This was Madeline. She watched the traffic channel with accompanying weather reports. She stared at the newspaper but not necessarily at the news. She watched a bird land on the rail of the small balcony that jutted from the living room and she kept watching, motionless, the bird also watching whatever it was watching, still, sunlit, alert, prepared to flee. She hated the small orange day-glo price stickers on grocery cartons, medicine bottles and tubes of body lotion, a sticker on a peach, unforgivably, and I’d watch her dig her thumbnail under the sticker to remove it, get it out of her sight, but more than that, to adhere to a principle, and sometimes it took minutes before she was able to pry the thing loose, calmly, in fragments, and then roll it in her fingers and toss it in the trash can under the kitchen sink. She and the bird and the way I stood and watched, a sparrow, sometimes a goldfinch, knowing if I moved my hand the bird would fly off the rail and the fact of knowing this, the possibility of my intercession, made me wonder if my mother would even notice that the bird was gone, but all I did was stiffen my posture, invisibly, and wait for something to happen.
    I’d take a phone message from her friend Rick Linville and tell her he’d called and then wait for her to call back. Your theater friend Rick, I’d say, and then recite his phone number, once, twice, three times, out of spite, watching her put the groceries away, methodically, like the forensic preservation of someone’s war-torn remains.
    She cooked sparse meals for us and drank wine rarely—and never, to my knowledge, hard liquor. Sometimes she let me prepare a meal while she issued casual instructions from the kitchen table, where she sat doing work she’d brought home from the office. These were the simple timelines that shaped the day and deepened her presence. I wanted to believe that she was my mother far more compellingly than my father was my father. But he was gone so there was no point matching them up.
    She wanted the paper napkin untouched. She was substituting paper for cloth and then judging the paper to be indistinguishable from cloth. I told myself there would eventually be a lineage, a scheme of direct descent—cloth napkins, paper napkins, paper towels, facial tissues, sneeze tissues, toilet tissues, then down into the garbage for scraps of reusable plastic packaging minus the day-glo price stickers, which she’d already removed and crumpled.
    There was another man whose name she would not tell me. She saw him on Fridays only, twice a month maybe, or only once, and never in my presence, and I imagined a married man, a wanted man, a man with a past, a foreigner in a belted raincoat with straps on the shoulders. This was a cover-up for the uneasiness I felt. I stopped asking questions about the man and then the Fridays ended and I felt better and started asking questions again. I asked whether he wore a belted raincoat with straps on the shoulders. It’s called a trench coat, she said, and there was something final in her voice so I decided to terminate the man in the crash of a small plane off the coast of Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, body unrecovered.
    Certain words seemed to