My mother wasn’t feeling well. The symptoms came on one evening at the clubhouse dance and for the next two days, she had a mild headache, a stiff neck, a slight fever, a tickle in her throat, and fatigue, enough to keep her in bed, playing spider solitaire on her tablet, entranced by the miracle of the endlessly replenishing game. Doted on, help just a whisper away, she ate soups and lightly buttered toast in the semi-dark with a high bed tray like a sturdy bridge over her thighs. If she got up at all, it was to go into the master bathroom from which her shooshing slippers could be heard all over the sprawling, house built on a slab in the Spanish style. Then there was the terrible unspoken thing, that she was shrinking, even during my visit to Florida, getting smaller.
I hadn’t seen my mother in well over a year. This was also the first time I was meeting her boyfriend, Robert, who she’d been telling me about during our weekly Sunday morning phone calls. She seemed happy with him as she had never been with my father and his failure to be more than he was. Even in death, poor, clumsy, bookish, unromantic Dad couldn’t catch a break. So gallant, so attentive, such a fine dancer was Robert. My mother had moved out of the condo she and my Dad had scraped and saved to buy to escape the New York winters into Robert’s house in a posh, gated community built around a man-made lake, which was the home to medium-sized alligators who could be seen sunbathing on the grassy banks, grinning at their luck.
“He’s a very nice, refined, generous man,” she repeated often, this most important thing.

Robert opened a can of pea soup, put it on the stove, went into his study and sat down at the computer again, googling the words “headache”, “stiff neck” “dizziness” “fever” “influenza” “meningitis”. Across the room on a wall-mounted TV, a Fox News talking head was carrying on about something at a volume too low to hear, making his brow-furrowed insistence comical with its exhortations and vehement unheard views. All else was quiet too for a while, no throat clearing, no shoosh, shoosh. Maybe, Mom was napping.
I put my hand on Robert’s shoulder, the first time I’d touched him since our firm handshake at the airport. Even at eighty-three, he felt strong and solid, like some immovable thing sunk in the mud of his own stubborn being. Unlike my mother’s frailer, diminishing body, Robert’s body seemed protected by an indestructible covering like a bark or exoskeleton to fend off weakness, injury and disease. There was something timeless about him, stalwart and invincible, like the venerable king in an ancient fairy tale.
“How’s it going? How are you holding up?” I asked, but got no answer as Robert focused on the screen.
“They put the most important ones first,” he said a few seconds later, as if it was a revelation. “This shouldn’t take long.”
I noticed the pleasing scent Robert’s flesh gave off; he was as fresh and powdered as a plump, bathed infant. If there was any decay underneath, you couldn’t smell it.
“I love your mother very much.”
“That’s wonderful, man.”
“Her birthday is in two weeks. Don’t forget.”
I said none of the things I wanted to say. That I had over fifty years of remembering compared to Robert’s one or two, that I had never and would never forget her birthday, knowing the penalty. But most crucially, I didn’t mention the thing foremost on my mind, her diminishment. Did he see it too?
“I won’t forget,” I said, instead. “Thanks for the reminder.”
After almost a week, we were still careful, feeling each other out, as befits planets revolving around the same sun, holding our gravity close. I actually sort of liked the guy, though there was a flat-screened TV tuned to Fox News in every room except the bedroom. Robert never seemed to watch or even listen but to absorb the programs through his pores, everything so certain in general that he didn’t need to hear the particulars. He seemed to keep the TV playing for company, like keeping a housecat. Or maybe he kept the volume down in deference to me. At least he wasn’t one of those crazies who believed God was on his side, but rather he liked low tax rates for the rich and everyone else pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Laissez faire, hard work, paying your dues, helping your neighbor, quiet manly chivalry, those bedrock American traits. Robert’s traditional, right-wing views seemed inseparable from his solidity, his authority, his ever-smiling optimism, his view of himself as a knight in shining armor for a lady in distress.
While he continued jabbing at the keyboard with his thick index fingers, I noticed that he had no hair on the rims of his ears and none sprouting like thorns from inside them like the swarthy men in my family. His glossy red and yellow dome was completely bald except for pale fringes that scooped back sharply over his ears and widened to join in a bristling swath at his nape. Fascinating to look at. Hypnotizing. An advertisement preserved from a lost time. He regularly got a trim, a shave, and shoeshine at the barber like the gent he was, though his promise to take me there had to be put off. His fringes of hair grew relentlessly, a sign of life force.
Robert was a millionaire several times over, intent on spoiling my mother with extravagant meals and luxury cruises, clothes and jewelry, dancing lessons and a new, navy-blue Cadillac every September, and with his kind attentions, at least while I was visiting.
When we heard her clear her throat as if she might speak, we headed toward the bedroom, Robert naturally charging into the lead. I didn’t bother keeping up. I was feeling a strange, teenager-like lethargy in the face of an adult so certain of the truth and what must be done about it.
“Pain, my love?”
“Something’s burning.”
I led this time, at a trot, into the kitchen where the electric burner glowed under a smoking sauce pan. After running water into the pot to a thrilling burst of crackling steam and opening the window, I turned to tell Robert that I would take care of the cleanup but he was already gone, back to the bedroom now that everything was under control. I was allowed to handle this kind of thing, the breakfast and lunch dishes, running to the drugstore and grocery store, fetching the mail and newspaper from the curbside mailbox where I often caught a glimpse of a lounging alligator.
I had learned over the phone how the 55+, well-maintained and privately patrolled community accepted the alligators, until one morning a gator surprised a duck, in full sight of the lady’s walking group, including my mother. One spongy muffled quack and it was over. “Disgusting.” There was a community association meeting about the situation. Wooden decoys, it was decided would teach the alligators a lesson. Unfortunately, the decoys only attracted more ducks and had to be removed; the item remains pending on the association agenda.
I had noticed my mother’s startling size when I arrived at the airport and it had only gotten worse over the week as those two kept up their habit of dancing most nights after eating out at a high class restaurant, where the wait staffs doted on us, because Robert was an extravagant tipper who liked my mother to feel fussed over. He palmed extra bills into the knowing hands of the hostesses, waiters, waitresses and busboys but the move was ostentatiously surreptitious, sneaking in order to be caught sneaking. I felt him watching to see if I noticed it.
One night, I insisted on paying but Robert wouldn’t have it, the first time he ever slightly bared his teeth at me. He said my money was no good in Florida and that I had done enough by coming down and making my mother so happy with my visit. Robert didn’t carry a wallet, but a wad shoved into the pockets of his gabardine pants, a striking, unashamed detail in his portrayal of whoever it was he was supposed to be. Yet, everything in Florida was sort of like that, an in-your-face unreality that left you questioning basic truths. It was out there on the surface with the danger hidden underwater. The sated alligator was now lounging in the sun.
My visit didn’t change their routines one bit. The only thing that stopped them from eating out and dancing were these symptoms that had laid my mother low two nights ago.
Mom had always been tall and nicely built with strong swaying hips, full breasts and broad, elegant shoulders, and was a real dame still, Robert kidded to her delight. But she was no longer that tall. Her back had bowed, her head hung forward and her shoulders curved over and down and a bit sideways. Since I had last seen her, she had turned into a little old lady, one getting littler by the day, under the looming, protective shadow of the man who loved her so much.
Two nights before, I went with them to the community clubhouse dance to be shown off as a loving, visiting son. I watched them slow whirl around the clubroom floor to a boombox on the little stage, thinking he’s wearing her out, fueling her up with high priced meals then emptying her even more.
I spent my time having to dance with the other little old ladies who asked me though I soon learned to be glad for them because they were preferable to the ones in their early sixties who fancied themselves in my league. It was horrible: The hot discomfort of having solid, elasticized tummies and packed-in breasts shoved into me with such insistence sent me back to my Bar Mitzvah and being yanked around the dance floor by my spinster cousin Evelyn, who shoved her bony crotch into my as-yet undeveloped one for an entire slow song, and also back to my dreaming about it for years and waking in a sweat.
I preferred the little old ladies, light as birds with beaky faces, bony hands and brittle shoulders and hips. One of them, Nanette, who I lifted off the floor by accident during a foxtrot, said, “We were all after Robert but your mother got him because she doesn’t push herself. She never cooked casseroles for men like the others. She didn’t have to, not her. She’s just so elegant, so refined, so beautiful.”
“Do you think she’s losing weight, Nanette?”
“She looks great, doesn’t she? It’s from all the dancing.”
“I mean, weight she needs.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s what happens. Every woman in the community is jealous of her shape.”
It was after a particularly strenuous lindy at the Tuesday night dance that the symptoms started, with tiredness and a headache. My mother stayed in bed all day Wednesday, not calling the doctor, because you just don’t know and don’t want to over-react and be one of those annoying patients who go to the doctor so soon and so often that he won’t be on your side when you really need him. Now it was Thursday though, and neither did they want to under-react so Robert put in the call. I felt glad for this illness because it would allow me to ask the doctor, if I got the chance, what was really on my mind, to get some objective feedback about her condition. My flight home was the next day.
“It was nothing,” Robert said to her in the bedroom. “How’s your head, my darling?”
“I’m not dead yet. I can still smell,” she said.
“It’s taken care of, Sweetie.”
Robert got into bed with her and took her hand. He was so large compared to her, if he were to roll over he’d break her in half, no doubt. I asked if I could speak to Robert for a second.
“You might as well say whatever it is right here,” my mother said. “He’ll tell me everything anyway.”
Back in the computer room a while later, about to ask him about my mother’s shirnking and what he had noticed, the phone rang. My mother answered it and spoke a while to the doctor while Robert and I stood in the bedroom doorway, his thick, big-bellied body hulking and close. We were all thin in my family, a thin, nervous bunch.
After my mother hung up, she told us the doctor said it was probably nothing, maybe a little virus that was going around, especially since it hadn’t gotten any worse. He advised her to take it easy over the next few days then come into the office if the symptoms didn’t go away. I didn’t believe it for a minute.
“That’s great, Sweetie,” Robert said on the bed with her again, holding her hand, like a great log next to a pile of kindling sticks.
“I am feeling better,” she said, smiling up at him.
“Shut the door, kid, on your way out,” Robert said.
The next day my mother said she was feeling even better and assented when Robert asked her about that night’s dance. They drove me to the airport before going out to eat, at the Greek place because it was Thursday. On the ride, stopped at a red light, Robert caught my eyes in the rear view mirror, held them, and said, “Your mother and I are going to do as much as we can for as long as we can.”
“That’s a wonderful way to look at it,” I said, smiling at him in the mirror. A powerful exhaustion filled me.
“You bet.”
My first night home, though I’d been away for more than a week, worn out, I didn’t share much with my wife about the visit. Nor did I reach for her in bed but fell immediately asleep and into a dream about my mother and Robert dancing. As he whirled her around to an ancient folk song, both of them madly smiling, madly in love, my mother kept shrinking, getting smaller and smaller until she was nothing but a child in his arms. I was smiling too as I watched them, aghast and helpless, at the unreality of it all. The thing I had to say would remain unsaid in deference to their dance. My mother had never been happier.