One True Thing

by Anna Quindlen

  “I’m really glad you guys are home,” I said.

  “Me too. Especially for Brian. He’s having a really hard time at school. Hates his roommate, hates his adviser, hates his courses. I think it’s basically because he hates not being here. He even talked about transferring to Langhorne so he could be near Mom.”

  “Dad would never stand for it. Besides, if he doesn’t do it next semester, he won’t have to do it at all.”

  “You think?” Jeff said.

  “Yeah. Unless there’s some kind of miracle, I think we’ll be coming into the home stretch soon.”

  “Ah, shit,” Jeff said. “How soon?”

  “I’m like an alcoholic. I take it one day at a time. I can’t tell you what next week is going to be like.”

  “I saw Jon in Cambridge a couple of weeks ago. I went up to see the guys at BU and had a drink with him. He told me he wasn’t coming home for Christmas.”

  “I don’t think he can deal with the idea of someone losing their mother.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s very understanding of you, but I think he needs to play out his little personal psychodrama at some other time, when someone he allegedly cares about doesn’t need him quite as much. I think his behavior sucks.”

  “And you told him that.”

  Jeff smiled. “Is the Pope Polish?” he said.

  “And?”

  “He’s not the kind of guy you need in a tough time,” Jeff said.

  “No,” I said.

  “On the other hand,” Jeff said, “a year ago I would have said the same thing about you.”

  Teresa was swinging her stethoscope when she came downstairs. She had on big gold hoop earrings and a dress this time, with a long full white skirt that almost swept the ground, and she was carrying a small box, wrapped in red with red-and-green striped ribbon. All week I’d been delivering gifts while my mother slept, to neighbors, to nurses, to Dr. Cohn, who took out the small needlepointed pillow on the end of a ribbon that said OY VAY and hung it on the doorknob of her office. “The oncologist’s creed,” she said. “I believe that was the thought behind the gift,” I had said.

  Teresa held up her little box and smiled. “What a lovely woman she is,” she said.

  “You have any more jokes?” I said.

  “No, no more. Those children are fixated on Blueberry Hill, Blueberry Hill, I believe because we told them it was vulgar. The boy keeps repeating the word, vulgar, vulgar, as though he loves the idea.”

  Jeff stuck out his hand. “Jeff,” he said. “Gulden.” Recovering a bit, he added, “All County Soccer, All County Lacrosse, eldest son, power serve.”

  “I believe your mother already told me all that,” Teresa said cooly. Turning to me, she added, “I don’t see any real problem with the catheter site. I’ve irrigated it again, and taken a blood sample, which Dr. Cohn wanted. When was her last medication?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “She seems very very tired to me. I don’t believe the adjustment on the dosage or frequency is exactly right. May I speak to Dr. Cohn about it?”

  “Sure. She naps in the morning and the afternoon now, but she doesn’t plan them so much as she just drops off. Sometimes she’ll fall asleep on the couch while she’s reading or in her chair when the TV’s on. Then she’ll be fine for a while and then she’ll start to fade again. She’s particularly tired this week because she had a bad night Tuesday. My father wants to know—does the morphine cause hallucinations?”

  Teresa looked up the stairs, then at Jeff. “Can we sit down?” she said.

  “There are a variety of opinions about hallucinations and the use of morphine,” she said when we were in the living room. “Many physicians will tell you that it does not happen. Others will say that it is one possible side effect. Some nurses will tell you that what happens are not hallucinations at all. When did this happen?”

  “The other night she woke up crying about babies and thunderstorms.”

  “Well. There are several possibilities. One is that it was a nightmare and she had a more acute reaction than you or I might have because of the medication. The other is that it was a true hallucination. But she also may be working out some matters mentally that would emerge in that fashion. I know that is very vague, but we think some people we see have things that they want to think about or talk about and that the people who care for them can only see those things as hallucinations.”

  “Like?”

  “I have an older woman dying of cancer of the pancreas who constantly accuses her husband of infidelity with a variety of their acquaintances. Very vividly and in considerable detail, I might add. I’ve learned a few things I did not know about sexual congress.”

  “Oh, shit,” said Jeff.

  “Are we sure he’s not?” I said.

  “We are sure he is not,” said Teresa with a slight smile. “It is my theory that she is contemplating his life without her and that her anger and fear leads her to rehearse it in that way.”

  “Babies and thunderstorms?” Jeff said.

  “I am not a psychiatrist, Mr. Gulden, and I am told that Ellen does not want to consult one. But perhaps you are the babies and this”—she swept her arm around the house and brought her hand to rest on her bag and its welter of medical equipment—“is the storm.”

  “Maybe you should think about psychiatry,” Jeff said. “That’s pretty credible.”

  “Perhaps you can discuss her dreams with her, Ellen.”

  “I wish I could just take your stethoscope and listen to her heart. Really her heart, not the beating, but inside.”

  Teresa took the stethoscope from her bag and handed it to me. “Maybe it will help. Any intimacy will help. I can get another one.” She stood up. “I think I will come again soon if you are not opposed.”

  “Any time,” said Jeff.

  “Mind your own business, Jeff.” I slung the stethoscope around my neck. Sometimes, afterward, I’ve thought of that, how that was the first time I’d ever handled a stethoscope and how I hung it around my neck, just like the doctors and nurses did. I’ve thought about how Teresa gave it to me and how I kept it even though I knew I should offer to hand it back.

  “My mother likes you, Teresa,” I said. “Come as often as you think necessary, or helpful, or whatever. I have a feeling she may need you more often now.”

  “Yes,” Teresa said, picking up her coat.

  “How long?” Jeff said.

  “I cannot say for sure,” Teresa said. “It’s more important that you take advantage of the time you have than that you worry about how much time there is.”

  And that was exactly what we did over the next week. The boys took her out in the jeep, wrapped in scarves and blankets against the cold, to see the Christmas decorations all over town, from the austere white lights in the bushes and trees outside some of the largest houses in our neighborhood to the small Cape Cod on a narrow county road ten miles from town, which had big plastic choirboys with 200-watt bulbs inside their pink heads singing on the lawn, a sleigh and eight reindeers in tortured postures on the roof, and a blinking sign that said JOYEUX NOËL covering the garage door.

  The three of them came in that night howling because of Jeff’s description of what he called “La Maison de Billion Lumières” and the electric bill of the family that lived inside. I could hear them in the den as I made cocoa and set out Christmas cookies on a plate in the kitchen.

  “How can we possibly turn in without calling them and, as politely as possible, saying, ‘Monsieur, Madame, why French? Why?’” Jeff cried. “‘To add a touch of class to the Little Rascals with their plastic choir robes? Because—get this, folks—it’s not working!’”

  I brought a tray in and Brian added, “Geez, El, if you could see this place. And Jeff is driving real slow, real slow, and doing this description of all the stuff they have, and Mom is saying, ‘Jeffrey, they will hear you!’ But he can’t hear her because she’s laughing so hard she’s making little squeaky noises.”

/>   “He was very mean,” said my mother, laughing.

  “I was just as mean about how constipated the Byers’ house looked, with the white candles in each window. I’m an equal opportunity mean person. No one can call me a snob.”

  “You’re a snob,” said Brian.

  Jeff grabbed him in a half nelson. “You’re toast,” he said. “You’re through.”

  My father stepped into the den from the hallway, his hand over the telephone receiver. “Will you all please be quiet!” he hissed. “I am on the phone to Cambridge!”

  “Jesus,” Jeff whispered. “Cambridge! I almost interrupted a conversation with someone in Cambridge.”

  “Jeff,” said my mother.

  “All right, Little Ma. The cookies are supreme, as always.”

  “Talk to your sister, dear. She made them.”

  Jeff stared at me. “Picture it,” he said. “Ellen Gulden actually putting flour and water in the same place at the same time—using the Mixmaster—the spatula.”

  “What the hell do you think I’ve been doing around here all this time?” I said. “Who do you think runs the vacuum and does the laundry and makes all the meals? Who do you think shops and cleans and makes the beds?” My voice began to break and there were tears in my eyes. I stopped and turned away, back to the kitchen. “Shit,” I heard Jeff say, and my mother did not reprimand him.

  We watched all of the Christmas movies, Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life, and when George Bailey’s brother called him the richest man in town we sat there sobbing, and even my father cried silently. On Christmas Eve I made shrimp and opened champagne. “Betty Crocker! Sit right here by me,” said Jeff, and this time I did not lose my equilibrium. We watched A Christmas Carol, the old black-and-white English version with Alastair Sim.

  “There has quite literally never been a good film made of one of Dickens’s novels,” my father said, peering at the screen over the top of his reading glasses, The New York Review of Books open on his lap. “It’s not possible. The backbone of Dickens is physical description. It’s the description that fails them. Look, now, here’s the party scene when Scrooge is an apprentice and nothing, absolutely nothing they can do in the way of casting or dialogue for the character of, say, a Fezziwig, can touch what is in the book.”

  “I bet that’s just what Mario Puzo says about The Godfather,” said Jeff.

  “Listen to the dialogue, Ellen,” my father said. “The rhythm’s been completely eradicated.”

  “Oh, put a sock in it, Gen,” my mother said, and we all burst out laughing, all except my father, who colored slowly, from chin to forehead. Jeff had gone to get a copy of the book from my room, and he was reading along with the movie dialogue, which was remarkably intact. “I’m sorry, really,” my mother added, “but you can’t be condescending about A Christmas Carol. Not tonight.”

  “My point was—”

  “I know. But I want to watch the movie.”

  I think at any other time my father would have continued the argument, or perhaps at any other time my mother would never have begun it in the first place. But he fell silent and read while the rest of us finished one bottle of champagne and opened another.

  “Are you still angry at me, Gen?” my mother said during a commercial break. “I was never angry at you,” he said.

  But when we discovered she had fallen asleep, after Scrooge had learned to keep Christmas, he would not carry her upstairs. Perhaps it seemed too intimate a gesture to make while his three children stood around. Or perhaps, I thought, remembering how happy my mother had been the morning after their disastrous dinner, carrying her upstairs promised something afterward that he did not want to give. We woke her—“It’s over? It’s over?” she asked, like a small child who’d fallen asleep at the circus—and Brian led her upstairs.

  Next morning she was up at seven, earlier than she’d been in weeks, to lie on the couch and open her presents. Jeff gave her a silk scarf with big bunches of purple grapes all over it, enormous and luxurious, and she slung it around her shoulders. Brian gave her a copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. She said brightly, “I’ve been meaning to read this for years,” and the two of them laughed until they choked and had to be pounded on the back. Brian leaned toward me and whispered, “It’s another one of those romance novels. The Duanes gave me the Roman Empire dust jacket.”

  I gave her a set of walkie-talkies, so we could communicate when she was in a different part of the house. My father gave her a platinum band of small diamonds in one perfect circle. It caught the light and turned it blue and pink, and though it fell down to her first knuckle when she moved, no one suggested she get it in a smaller size.

  “It’s called an eternity ring,” said my father, almost shyly.

  “I know,” my mother said, the small stones brilliant against the dark blue of her velour robe. “It’s beautiful, Gen. It’s the nicest thing I’ve ever gotten.”

  Jonathan sent me a datebook, one of those thick leather ones that very busy women take out and put on the table at lunches, filled with phone numbers and memos to themselves and a page for each day of the year and a map of the London Underground, as though they ever traveled by anything but cab. The whole year to come moved like playing cards under my fingers, empty and clean, February, July, November.

  I paged through, sitting on the floor beside the tree. My birthday in August was on a Friday, my mother’s a Tuesday at the end of June. Easter did come early, at the end of March.

  “Subtle, isn’t he?” said Jeff as he looked over my shoulder at the empty white pages.

  I still own that datebook. I use it every day now; I’d be lost without it, without all the phone numbers, the slips of paper with scribbled notes about times and consults and medication, the notes about where I have to be next Tuesday, next Friday, next month. Sometimes I feel if I lost it I would lose the linchpin of my life. But of course I remember that in one way I lost the linchpin years before, not long after I acquired the datebook. It was not an even swap.

  When the year is done I take its pages, its scrawled and sloppy and often unintelligible record—what did “11—DMC” on May 12 mean, anyhow?—and put them in a small manila envelope, seal it, and put it in a shoe box. Jules, who has things thrown in boxes in every closet in her apartment, bank statements and telephone messages and old junk mail and family photographs, says I am anal and do this to bring surface order to a spiritually chaotic life. But by now, five years after the habit began, it has simply become one of those things you do, like the way you fold or ball your socks or whether you eat corn on the cob from left to right or right to left.

  I never open the envelopes to look at those old pages. And no one, looking at them after I am gone, will know much more about me than they’ve known before, except perhaps, if it was not already manifest, that I am a very, very busy woman and that I like to use a fine-tip marker pen with black ink, not blue.

  But what would surely perplex anyone who ripped open the yellow envelopes and looked inside are the first two months of the first year. I remember well that they are completely empty.

  The datebook sat on my desk through January and February. I wrote Jules’s number in it, which was unnecessary, since I knew it by heart. I wrote in Jeff’s and Brian’s addresses at school. I did not write in Jonathan’s address; he had done it himself. In blue ballpoint. The only blue ballpoint entry in the book.

  “Do you like it?” Jon asked. “I was going to get you the one with a week on a page but I figured it would never be enough, with all your running around. The day-on-a-page version makes it pretty fat, but I figured the trade-off would be worth it.”

  “It’s great, Jon,” I said.

  “It was calling your name,” he said.

  And it was, it was calling the name of the old Ellen Gulden, the girl who would walk over her mother in golf shoes, who scared students away from writing seminars, who started work on Monday after graduating from Harvard with honors on a Th
ursday, who loved the moments in the office when she would look out at the impenetrable black of the East River, starred with the reflected lights of Queens, with only the cleaning crew for company, and think of her various superiors out at dinner parties and restaurants and her various similars out at downtown clubs or cheap but authentic places in Chinatown and say to herself, “I’m getting ahead.” That Ellen Gulden, the one her boss suspected of using the dying-mother ploy to get more money or a better job title, would have covered every inch of these pages with the frantic scribble of unexamined ambition.

  For two months I wrote nothing in it. I had no need. The big event of January was when the hospital bed was delivered and we moved the furniture from the den into the living room to accommodate it. The home of Kate Gulden was being dismantled bit by bit, going to that place where past perfect lives dwell, perhaps to live there side by side with the former Ellen Gulden, who ate ambition for breakfast and anyone who got in her way for lunch.

  The last good afternoon I remember was when I learned to make bread. I kneaded and folded and patted down and covered up with a dishcloth and my mother and I talked about Teresa and what she did. As the bread rose we sat in the living room with our fat copies of Anna Karenina. I lost myself in the book, in Levin’s scything under the hot sun, in Vronsky’s self-absorption, in the romances and the intrigues and Anna’s palpable misery and obsession. It was only when the light died in the room and I could no longer see the letters properly that I looked at my mother, who was looking at me, the book held open with her hand.

  “I’m glad we did this one,” I said in a rush, “because I’d really like your opinion. The last time I read it was for a course on women in literature and we had this young woman professor who said that the fatal flaw of the book was that it was written by a man and that Anna would have left her husband for her lover but that she never would have left her son, that if a woman had written the book she would have known that. I tried to talk to Papa about it once, but he kissed the whole idea off—I think he said that Anna stood for the body and Kitty for the spirit or something like that, which I suppose is right. But what do you think? Do you think she was right, that Anna would have stayed for the sake of the child?”