by Aimee Bender
It had been my idea to go up on my own. I was soon to enter my senior year of high school, and my mother had, a few weeks earlier, tried to leave Hawthorne House to take me back, even though the timing made no sense, and I had never agreed to go, but she had returned to the facility after a few days anyway, apologizing to me at every phone call, voice crashing about how she just couldn’t do it, she was so sorry, that Hawthorne House was better for her right now but that she would hopefully be able to try again soon. This was all her own conversation with herself; I had no plan to move back up there, which I had never said to her out loud, but I’d decided as a kind of compromise that maybe I could fly up on my own for the first time, just to see her for the afternoon. Vicky was doing a bug project related to her summer art/science camp, including all kinds of materials and drawings, and it had sparked my own interest in retelling Vicky about the emergence of the butterfly, as well as the next visitor, the beetle that had soon followed, and I’d thought, as she and I cut out spider bodies from black cardstock, attaching twisted pipe cleaner antennae, threading ants from brown beads, for the first time, that it actually might also be helpful to talk about these incidences with my mother. Maybe she would have some ideas. Maybe she, in fact, was the perfect person to help me give this strangeness its due. I definitely didn’t want to trouble Aunt Minn, who took any unordinary conversation as worrisome bait that my mind might be turning.
That evening, spiders tucked leggily into Vicky’s shoebox, after I’d helped out in the kitchen and Vicky was settled into bed, Uncle Stan out on an errand getting paper towels, I had approached my aunt at the desk in her room where she sat returning work emails. Her and my uncle’s bedroom sparkled with its array of delicates, including a daisy-encrusted glass cube, a hammered tin sign telling her to Slow Down in raised cursive, the old clay pen cup I’d made years ago that my mother had sent her once as a gift from Portland. “Come in, Francie!” she said, seeing me there. “Please! I could use a little distraction.” At her desk, I told her I wanted her advice, that I knew we were due for our late summer Portland visit, but that I was thinking I might like to fly up to see my mother on my own this time, just to give it a try, my voice so tentative, fingers twisting, and her face, strained by work details, had cleared, and opened; “Oh, I’m sure she’d love that!” she said, laughing with delight, and she clicked away from her tasks, and went onto the airline’s website right away so we could pick out the flight together. Her presence next to me, firm, excited, confident in the idea, was the only reason I could select my seats, and input her credit card number, and get the confirmation email; besides the obvious and crucial financial support, her body by mine was supplying an interim space in which the buying of this plane ticket was possible.
To my surprise, I looked forward to the trip for weeks. I usually did not enjoy our visits to Portland; good rating or not, I didn’t like the facility, with its nurses briskly walking everywhere, and the rusting outdoor furniture, and my pulse rushing when we turned the corner to find my mother waiting for us with giant eyes like we’d long been separated at sea. But this time felt different, driven by something new, and my mother, on the Sunday calls, had bubbled over with excitement when I’d told her, and had talked nonstop about how there would be a special space next to her at lunch, and that she was making me a sweater, and that she wanted to introduce me to everyone the minute I stepped in from the airport. Plus, the plane itself, what had tormented me at eight years old, was no longer an issue. Turned out the adults had been right, and it did not blur out the window after all. Years earlier, when my aunt and I had flown up together to see my mother for the first time, just a few months after the move to Burbank, I had gripped her hand in our cushioned seats, terrified, knuckles tight, and Aunt Minn had pulled the shade over her window while I kept my head down and tried to focus on my activity book. As I worked, I kept checking my hands to see if they would blur, if I was already dissipating, and once in a moment of courage let my eyes graze to the window across the aisle in the other direction, expecting to find a world that had lost definition, but the landscape was sharply drawn and particulate below, as if we were not traveling hundreds of miles per hour, and I found I could track all of it—tidy patterns of farmland, gray strips of road, mountain crevices, cloud movement. The flight attendant came by with a cart, and he was clear too, a person with outlines, and the orange juice he handed to me looked like any other orange juice I ever drank on firm land. So the ride was good, and Aunt Minn had hugged me with pride when we landed, telling me how I had conquered a fear, which was by far the best part of the visit, because that time at Hawthorne House itself had been rough. My mother, at that stage, knew no one at the facility except one doctor and two nurses, and she’d wept onto Minn’s shoulder, her face small with helplessness and loss, the two sisters holding each other tightly, while I’d stood and stared with a kind of rabid intensity at the pointillated seascapes on the walls.
“Anything I should look out for with Mom?” I asked, at seventeen, when we stopped at a red light near Victory, the only car in the intersection. The darkness was beginning to thin around us, although the sun had not yet peeked out from behind the hills. My aunt shook her head. She said she didn’t think so. Just to enjoy myself, truly. Her eyes were alert and sad on the road, focused on the traffic light, and she felt, on that morning, of a particular mystery to me. The light changed, and we passed rows of stores like movie sets, modest cobblers, and cafés, and burger joints, progressing through the streets, moving into Burbank’s everlasting supply of parts stores: sheet metal, vinyl, fiberglass, door and window showrooms. A few cars joined us on the street, headlights dazzling, and the outlines of hills began to sharpen a little in the distance. When the glowing sign for the airport rose up on our left, Bob Hope Airport, named for the actor who had lived his adult life nearby in Toluca Lake, Aunt Minn pulled to the curb at Terminal 1, handing over a white bakery bag of cookies my mother liked, an anise version of a biscotti almost certainly also available in Portland. My aunt brought this bag on our trip every time. Apparently long ago, in childhood, my mother had loved dipping biscotti.
“I’ll pick you up at nine,” Aunt Minn said, kissing my cheek. “It will mean so much for her to see you by yourself.”
And then she waved goodbye, pulling into the exit lane, leaving me at the edge of the sidewalk with the sun now stretching its morning rays to illuminate the browning slopes and tangled orange moss of the mountains. A few people trickled in from the parking lot with sheet-lined faces and damp hair, and the man outside at the gate drummed his fingers on the counter, waiting to check bags for passengers who did not want to check their bags indoors. I went inside to print my boarding pass and walked to security, which was empty. I was the only person in my line. The security officers were joking with each other about their Friday night pursuits, and I went through the motions, shoes off, shoes on, arms up, arms down, until my bag passed the X-ray and they waved me through, and all the while, as I advanced through the checkpoints, I tried to manage what felt like an almost crushing surge of anticipation inside, imagining myself alone with her, my mother.
It had been, by that point, almost ten years since I’d moved away from Portland, and therefore almost ten years since I had been with my mother by myself. Usually, on these visits, I felt myself as an appendage, following my aunt’s lead; she led the question and answer with my mother in the old lime green silk chairs in the main living room area, and she arranged the meal; she knew the nurses by name, and reported to my mother news of my good grades and jobs and modest accomplishments. I was relieved to let her do all of it, and usually sat next to her, braiding the soft tassels of the brocade pillows, nodding, listening, understanding my job as visitor as being made up of two parts—one, to privately manage the overwhelm of sense memory and longing and coldness I always felt seeing my mother again, and two, through my live presence, to show the other residents I existed, and that the smiley photos in frames
in her room were therefore not cut from magazines. Every time I had previously stepped into Hawthorne House, my mother ran over and hugged me and clasped my hands and shouted “Francie!” in a voice heavy with feeling, and claiming, telling me how much she missed me, and how she had been looking at flights and would be coming to see me soon, so soon, usually adding something about Disneyland. None of this was true; or, she may very well have been looking at flights, but she had never been able to visit, and she still said it every time as if the act of saying it was a kind of version of it, a visit in words. Neither of us could seem to admit aloud that we lived in different cities, and had, by that point, for a long time. Those weeks back, when she had checked out on the provisional pause to try to live on her own again, she had forgotten to take her medication, and within a week had returned, as they had a psychiatrist checking in, and the decline was obvious, and likely deliberate. This board and care was one of the better facilities in the city that accepted her Medicare, and no one really wanted her to give up her spot. No one meaning my aunt and my uncle, and possibly her, and surely, at times, me.
The keepers of the gate called my category, B 1–30, and I exited the glass door to the open air of the paved runway edges, mounting the movable staircase to enter the body of the plane and take my seat. As usual, I could see my mother in my mind as a dot on a map, far up the coast, and as I did the sudoku puzzle in the airline magazine, and drank my orange juice, and ate my peanuts, I moved through the air toward her, soaring over clouds past cities, and agriculture, and coastlines. I could track all of it. Everything so crisp to the eye. On the ground, I took the Red Line all the way to City Center, transferring to the 71, and then finally, near Fiftieth, walked several blocks through some blooming rhododendron-full residential streets up to the door of Hawthorne House, where I showed my ID at the front desk and told them I was there to see Elaine.
6
While I traveled by train and bus to my mother’s facility, a team entered the cabin of the airplane to clean it up before the next group of passengers boarded. I had used a cup, and a wrapper for the peanuts, and a napkin. I had missed the trash collection round by the flight attendant, absorbed in my puzzle, so had left them all stuffed in the seat pocket, where a person was now reaching in and adding them to a larger trash bag full of similar items. I thought of those things, too, as I rode to see my mother, as I often did. Little droppings of my existence.
7
Over the years, my mother had become a beloved resident; she was charming, and easy to be with, and skillful at coaxing people from sedentary spaces to gather together for evening activities. She could also sing at a piano, and there was a dingy brown one with tobacco-stained keys just like a person’s teeth wedged in the main room’s corner. No one knew where the piano had come from; its tone was resonant and full, but the high D was broken, and she would supply the real high D when the tall older man with the cracked knuckles would sit on the bench and play Christmas carols at any time of year. This room was usually where my aunt and I found her at our visits, and that particular one, as I walked toward the main living room area by myself, heart tripping, palms damp, passing the open window screens that let in the perfume of squashed summer fruits and flowers, the fecund abundance of August in northern Oregon, that was exactly what she was doing.
She sat close to the piano player on the wooden bench, a colorful scarf wrapped around her shoulders, her auburn hair combed and thickly wavy. He was finishing up “Sleigh Bells,” and as I quietly approached the room, they started in on the opening notes of “My Funny Valentine,” which had always been one of her favorites. What a wash of sensation I found in those notes, in a song she had sometimes murmured to me at bedtime. The pianist played with confidence, clearly someone who had been accompanying singers all his life, and though I had seen him many times before, I still did not know if he was a resident, or a visitor, or staff. My mother’s throaty alto took ahold of the song, and once I reached the edge of the doorway, I stopped, leaning as softly as I could against the wall to listen, far enough back so that I would not yet influence the room.
I knew this room very well. I took first some orientation just by being at the edge of it. It was a shabby room but pretty, lined with old books and vintage furniture, and decorated with faded paintings in ornate golden frames of cliffside seascapes that had all been donated by a resident’s wealthy relative. It had always been my favorite location of the visit. Most of the other residents were in the next room over, sitting in front of the TV, or settled on the rusting loveseats inside the atrium in the middle of the building, heads tilted back to look at an exposed square of sky, but those rooms had always seemed haphazard to me, thrown together without purpose, whereas the shabby room itself had the aura of a decaying European castle, and before I announced my presence to my person of significance inside it, I let its familiarity and broken elegance pour over me. Those paintings had been anchors for me during so many visits before; I doubted any other visitor knew so well the details of those beach scenes and their pails and wave crests and gradations of sunset. Or, perhaps they did. Perhaps many of us, resident and visitor alike, had learned those beach scenes to their core.
“Don’t change a hair for me,” sang my mother, with feeling. The music climbed the scale, and the piano made its thudding plunk for the high D, and her voice supplied a perfectly pitched ringing D against it, and the dissonance between the two seemed a helpful analogy for her state of being, one that seemed to meld and rotate between the broken D and the whole D, forever and ever amen.
She hadn’t seen me yet, but across the room, a nurse working on paperwork at a chipped, engraved teak desk glanced up and gave me a nod.
At some point I must’ve changed my position in the doorframe; the wood creaked and my mother whipped around, crying out, and then ran over to hug me, grasping my shoulders. “How long have you been there?” she asked, her eyes shining with tears. “You made it!” After thanking the pianist, who smiled at her, she pulled me to the side like we were guests at a party, bringing me over to the usual tattered green silk chairs; “Come,” she said, holding my hand in hers, “sit, tell me everything. How was the flight? How was it by yourself?” I gave her the biscotti, and she laughed, peering in the bag. “My sister,” she said, shaking her head. “Thinking of everything.”
It was awkward without my aunt there; we bumped around our sentences as if we’d just met, and when my mother asked again about the flight I told her every detail I could think of, hanging on to the tiny pieces of information like they were stepping-stones between us, which they were, including telling her my drink choice, and information about my seat companion, and how long I had waited for the bus (twenty minutes) while she listened with her large and hungry eyes. At some point her gaze began to move around my face, and she reached out her arms and held me back by the shoulders to look at me more directly. “Aren’t you such a gorgeous young woman?” she said, grasping my arms. “Look at you! Seventeen!”
“Seventeen.”
She complimented my hair, which was in a regular ponytail, and my clothes, which were the navy blue version of the sweatpants and sweatshirts that were my latest response to the pressures of adolescence. It was like she was complimenting the barest fact of my being. I was not a gorgeous teen; gorgeous was not ever the right word for me, but I knew, could feel, the bright light I was bringing her by sitting there.
She wiped her eyes with a tissue. Our last visit had been almost eight months ago. She looked older in the summer sun, the lines around her eyes finer, more plentiful.
My mother told me again how there was a space for me at lunch right next to her, right at her table, and that the food was decent because there was a new cook, a talented woman named Lucy, who maybe we could meet when the meal was over. She talked about her daily routine, how she had been singing all the time, and had started helping with the arrangement of a nightly entertainment schedule, which made her feel
more useful, which she appreciated. She talked of her talented friend Edward, who had grown up in the south of India, and who still had lots of family there, and who could sing when no one was listening with a soulful vibrato, which she tried to demonstrate with a heartiness that mortified my teenage self even though no one except the working nurse was in the room. “Edward is the piano player,” she added, nodding at the piano though he had left. She asked more about me, and I spoke first of Vicky, who had developed an interest in the school musical, and had been, at nine years old, a successful helping hand to her teacher in the wings for their production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and about how Uncle Stan had gotten a new crew job with an action film that might even end up as a series, and how Aunt Minn was working with a new employee at the middle school office who was giving her a hard time by being late every morning. I spoke about my classes, particularly how much I’d liked frog dissection in biology, and how I was starting to collect items from yard sales to resell when I happened to pass by, which I really enjoyed, and maybe was even a little good at, and about my friend Deena, who wore these tiny white faux-leather outfits all the time and who said she preferred my company over any other because I never overshadowed her. My mother made responsive sounds at appropriate times, huhs and aahs, wincing at the Deena statement, making sure to tell me that my appeal was understated but still beautiful, and how she didn’t want anyone to diminish me, and that she thought I would definitely pick objects very well; I explained how it really was a good deal for both me and for Deena, because Deena liked the spotlight, and I did not, and the words moved back and forth between us like some kind of rubber band, a way to keep us linked to one another while we got used to the feeling of being just the two of us together, but it was prelude and overture anyway, because all the while as we spoke, and as I did the filling in, getting the updates out of the way like they were bushes to clear on a trail hike, as the cliffside landscapes around us crashed painterly steel-colored waves onto those pointillated sandy beaches, I could feel, like a hard thing forming within me, what I really wanted to bring up now that I had her alone.
